Vantaggi
Smart people doing the work. Open Source technology. Usually good customers. Some great managers (if you're lucky).
Svantaggi
No executive-level leadership at this company anymore, only senior management. Current CEO has no experience leading, despite telling the same repeated story about the importance of good leadership. He spends more effort on appearance and delivering his (vague, confused) message than actually making sound business decisions. Priorities change every 3-6 months, leaving customers hanging out to dry. Consulting has to constantly smooth-over relationships with customers after products are started and dropped a year later. Growing problem of not-in-house mentality for product development. So many failed astroturf attempts to bootstrap open source communities around projects that only matter to Red Hat. Decisionmakers seem to have no accountability for bad decisions. I know cases where significant decisions were made with zero data simply because the decisionmaker didn't want to bother.