Red Hat did slightly better than the Wall Street pundits supposed it would in its last quarter, the dreaded summer months of June through August in the midst of an awful year.

Boosted by a tax benefit, earnings were up 29% to $27.5 million, or 15 cents a share or 16 cents (non-GAAP), on revenue up 12% year-over-year to $183.6 million against expectations of 15 cents on $179.1 million.

After 10 years as a public company, however, and despite becoming one of the S&P 500, the numbers look relatively puny, underlining the difficulties of being an open source company.

Red Hat said it was taking share and benefiting from the dislocation at Sun rather than seeing the market start gearing up for new projects. There are at best only "very early" discussions with accounts of the new projects that will herald economic recovery. It claims to be making progress in the cloud space.

Subscription revenue was $156.3 million, up 15%. Deferred revenue was up 17% to $581 million. Red Hat said it was "particularly pleased with the growth of the current portion of deferred revenue combined with the lengthening of our average subscription duration" to 22 months, up from 19 months in Q1.

Its top 30 accounts renewed at the rate of 120% in the quarter and included two deals worth $5 million and 10 worth $1 million; only three of its top 300 didn't renew; 23 of he top 30 went for RHEL Advanced Platform, five with a JBoss component. A financial services firm reportedly came back after bolting to Novell because of the famous Microsoft coupons, which pleased red Hat no end. The quarter also saw its largest deal ever in EMEA.

It said 15% of its revenues came from government.

JBoss is growing faster than the company's core business.

Red Hat's non-GAAP operating income for the quarter was $43.6 million, up 21% year-over-year. Operating cash flow totaled $62 million, up 14%. It's got $911.8 million in the bank.

The company figures it can return 15 cents-16 cents on revenues of $187 million-$189 million this quarter.