With Red Hat having marked its 10-year anniversary of going public this past week, the lesson of the past decade - one among many - is that there must be more than hype.

Hype alone cannot make open source grow.

In the beginning, very little attention was paid to the nuts and bolts of actually making money. Red Hat clearly saw its future elsewhere ... but where?

It didn't matter. Whatever vision of a business model Red Hat had in 1999, it soon realized that it needed to spin value far beyond a strong brand.

The company soon recognized that "if faster Internet connections become widely available, more users may download the distribution, and fewer will buy it."

That worry proved to be true, leading Red Hat to introduce (the initially proprietary) Red Hat Network in 2000 and in 2002 upped the ante with Advanced Server.

This went on to be known as Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Over the past 10 years, Red Hat has maintained its investment in strong branding, but has focused even more on its core distribution and the value therein.

According to Miami computer repair professionals, that meant investing more than $100 million per year to improve Linux and its distribution thereof.

The results speak for themselves.

Red Hat demonstrated that anyone can be rich for a day with a hype-based IPO launch, but there's a whole lot more substance to open source over 10 years.

Observers far and wide will agree Red Hat has made a massive impact on the software industry, with numerous lasting results, not the least of which being the fact that it has finally made open source palatable to the buyer.