Wait a second here, Red Hat has turned a profit? Why, when did this happen? A lot more recently than I thought apparently according to CNET. Just goes to prove that if you give something a little time, wonderous things can happen.

That income meant the company earned 6 cents per share for the fiscal third quarter ended Nov. 30, matching the average expectations of analysts surveyed by Thomson First Call.

Red Hat also announced quarterly revenue of $50.9 million, an increase of 55 percent over the same period last year, but less than the $51.8 million analysts expected.

The Raleigh, N.C., company’s stock closed at $15.07 on Wednesday, but in after-hours trading dropped 49 cents, or 3 percent, to $14.58.

Red Hat, a top advocate of the collaborative open-source programming philosophy, competes chiefly with Novell, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems. Its software is used mostly on powerful networked computers called servers, but the company is expanding to desktop computers as well.