Could Microsoft Buy Red Hat?

An anonymous reader writes "Various news sources including ZDnet are today reporting that Microsoft is considering buying out Red Hat, speculating that 'Microsoft could see Red Hat's acquisition as a nice way to undermine IBM, but might not consider that a sufficient reason to do it,' adding that Red Hat is however '...a company that wants to be Microsoft and, like Microsoft, makes its living packaging and selling other people's ideas.'" That description seems to miss the key point that Red Hat releases the software they package and sell as Free software, and that both companies pay coders to create and improve software in the first place.

Comments

Yeah, right.

[leomekenkamp]

I was reading this with a 'this just might be' attitude, until I came across "This combined with the the fact that the single biggest threat Red Hat faces right now is that of the possiblity of IBM could settling with SCO and then release its own Linux, (...)

IBM settling with SCO while they seem to be holding them at their balls? And then releasing their own linux distro? Yeah, right.

This 'article' is nothing, ziltch, nada, nop. No new facts, no reasoning, no nothing.

Big deal

[Danathar]

If they did...what exactly would they be getting? a Duplicate company called...say "Blue hat" could pop up in a couple of weeks with a duplicate copy of everything Redhat sells (besides the copyrighted red fedora) and start selling copies just like before.

Redhat's profits are primarily from service contracts and their automated patch udpates.

Remeber...everything is GPL'd...so buying out Redhat would at most just give MS some time (against Redhat ONLY)....there ARE other LINUX distros out there....like Mandrake...SuSE.....MEPIS...debian......

Re:I don't think so...

[MindStalker]

This would all make sense if RedHat could be purchased at a reasonable price. But right now RedHat is worth around 2 billion (they reported worth in their annual report of just over 1 billion based on at that time stock value or 7.25, stock is now 12.55, of course MS just needs to purchase a majority share.. And I'm not going to dig through their annual report that deeply.

Anyways most of what is RedHat is a free open-source program. So what would Microsoft be buying.
1. A building.
2. Its Employees (many of which would jump ship)
3. Some private code
4. The name (would would immediently be destroyed in many peoples eyes when Microsoft buys it)

This would effectivly be the worlds largest waste of money. While it may have some small long term goal of shutting down their compitition. Microsoft share holders would NEVER go for a billion+ dollar aquasition that would have almost nothing tangable about it.

Re:On MSFT buying SUNW

[Tassach]

A MSFT-SUNW merger would be shot down by the FTC, and would be a bad move for MSFT, for the exact same reasons given against a MSFT-RHAT merger.

MSFT has spent billions on marketing the idea that Windows is better in the server room than Unix and Linux. For them to turn around and buy a tier-1 Unix vendor would completely undermine that position. Likewise, Solaris is one of the few commercial OSes that can beat windows in the server room on technical merit, name recognition, and PHB appeal; for that reason it would be VERY unlikely that any merger would be approved.