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Red Hat Vs. The Lawyers
ajs writes "On July 13, Red Hat announced that they would be re-stating their revenues for the last 3 years. This sent a shock-wave through their stock price, but early analysis seems to indicate that it's not that big a deal (the end-result is the same for a given contract, but it will be counted toward a different month). But then the really bad news hit. [Opportunistic lawyers] are taking this opportunity to punish Red Hat for reporting the change and the resulting drop in price. Red Hat is doing well, but can they weather major class action law suits without harming the business? How have other technology companies dealt with this sort of suit?"
Rad Hat has annual revenue of less than $150 million. And a market cap just south of $3 Billion. A price/sales of 20. I'm sure Red Hat is a good business, and will continue to grow, but they have to grow a lot to justify that price. And since much of their revenue is for service, their costs will grow as their sales grow (in contrast to Microsoft's Windows monopoly, which requires very few marginal expenses for each sale). Nice company, can't imagine their stock will be much higher in 5 years.
I think the Motley Fool article is right. The drop in the stock price makes Red Hat a good buy right now.
The downside is the frivolous lawsuit. In the end RH should prevail, but it will spend a pretty penny defending itself. I'm all for class-action lawsuits when they are appropriate. This one against RH is not.
Tort reform is one of the few issues where I side with Republicans. Fair implementation is going to be the hard part.
About a month ago, Red Hat suddenly lost their CFO. Immediately thereafter, they pre-released earnings in order to cushion the blow. Now we find out two things: (1) the day before the CFO left, their auditor complained about their accounting practices, and (2) they recently received a request for information from the SEC. They didn't announce either of those facts during their extraordinary earnings release or at any time since then.
Like it or not, those are both material facts. No, the accounting change isn't all that significant, and yes, most SEC audits turn out fine, but that is irrelevant. They did things to prop up their stock price, and didn't publicize all the news, limiting themselves to the better news. To the extent that they propped up their stock price by selectively releasing only positive informaion, they're in violation of their fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders.
Blaming the ambulance chasers for Red Hat's misbehavior is like blaming Janet Reno for Microsoft being held in violation of the Sherman Antitrust laws. Just like MS, Red Hat did this to themselves; the attorneys are just doing their jobs by trying to hold crooks accountable for their crimes.
First, my opinion is that Red Hat is coming back from this hardship nicely. They are doing an excellent job of determining where their holes in product lines are and filling them.
;-)
I was one of the very vocal opponents of Red Hat dropping their standard distro in favor of Fedora, but I have largely changed my mind.
The only real issue is that one of my RedHat servers is running 7.x because Red Hat 8 had a glibc bug that prevented one of the programs from working properly, and upgrading to Fedora is going to be *tough.* I wish they made it easy at least to upgrade from RH9 to Fedora (Hear that RedHat?).
Now regarding this lawsuit, the SEC, etc. I find it encouraging that they are stating that the SEC must *review* (not *investigate*) their accounting statements. In other words, the SEC must probably approve the changes.
OTOH, the investigation into SCO so far looks more serious. It seems plain that the SEC is conducting a mostly secret investigation, as evidenced by the reports of Baystar being investigated for their involvement. In otherwords, the review of RedHat's papers is routine, while the investigation of SCO is serious stuff.
Yes, this is your tax dollars at work, and they are working pretty well
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I just don't get it. With fedora, I'm getting the same deal I was getting with the distro when it had redhat slapped on the label. I get a full OS, the price is right, in my case a few bucks plus shipping, and free security and enhancement updates. When I am stuck on something I go look on google. When I had a boxed set with RH on the label, it cost me 60 clams, and I got free security and enhancement updates. The only difference is I got some redhat stickers and a dead trees version of the manual. When I got stuck on something back then I went and looked on google. I have a better distro with more stuff than two years ago, and it costs me less, so I should be mad at redhat and..huh?
You make money from free software primarily by using that software in your other, *real* business, building/selling/servicing widgets.
Redhat got two versions,one sorta free kinda,and one really really free,and it actually costs them to provide it. One for businesses who are theoretically making enough money using computers somehow to be able to pay a fee for the "pro-commercial" version, and another one for hobbiests and enthusiasts who agree to help out and help develop and look for bugs, etc. Seems reasonable to me.
I don't see what the big negative deal is really. Either version works, the pro version has a different and more tweaked server and some other doo-dads obviously, but you get more support. The really free version has everything you need as well, just somewhat different, I mean apache is apache and whatnot. The money has to come from someplace. I think they made the right move, to both stay in business and keep getting better, and to offer the most to the most people for the most purposes (and most budgets to boot). It's not perfect, but what is?