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Red Hat Listed Among 50 Top Tech Companies
Kelvin Ekston writes " Red Hat is listed among ZDNet Asia's 50 Top Tech companies 2006. It is also one of the fastest growing companies with 210.4% year on year income growth over 4 years.
While almost all Linux companies grapple with the perennial question of how they can make money through software subscriptions and services rather than selling packaged boxes, Red Hat finally managed to improve credibly and match the hype with substance and show the way to do business with Linux. That's the way to go!"
The ad sponsors for the link are IBM, EMC and Redhat. Can you guess which three companies are on the list?
check out http://www.centos.org/
Twin or more? ITA
Apache/Spring/La
It seems to me that, as far as Linux distros are concerned, Redhat tends to be the whipping boy of the Linux enthusiasts on Slashdot.
Some days it seems like some folks put them just a step above Microsoft.
A lot of people on Slashdot are very anti-corporatist by nature. They'll be suspicious of any company that seems to be making a buck, even if they're selling Linux. To these people the only good Linux distro is a not-for-profit one that's run by a band of diehard enthusiast hackers.
One thing that killed their PE was constant dilution via secondary offerings, convertible debentures, and compensation stock options.
If you invested in Red Hat, you really invested in them.. Your money went straight into the companies asset sheet through their extreme dilution.
Red Hat is making good on it now for us long-term investors finally at least. They are buying back the convertible debentures and some of the stock. This should bring their PE down even if the P part stays constant.
It's going to take a while though, Red Hat effectively borrowed billions of dollars from their stockholders and they aren't going to pay it back overnight.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
That's a "Microsoft Answer"(TM).
.. RedHat won't recognize you then.
Sure, you *can* download a RHEL. It's just called Centos. Or WhiteBox.
But you're right
= Grow a brain...
... of salt.
going from barely making anything to making just a bit more can be a dramatic % growth but still not necessarily reflect a thriving business model which will generate year over year growth.
Redhat merged with Cygnus, didn't they? Cygnus have been profitable using an open-source business model since the late 80s/early 90s. And Redhat as a whole have been doing business for 12 years too - although they haven't always been in the black, they have still managed to pay the bills, pay wages, and put out products that people buy for well over a decade. Redhat aren't as unproven as you make out.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
really? what you point to is still on RHEL 4.1 while centos is already at 4.2 and I have never had a problem like you described.
Maybe back in the 3.x series they were lagging, but they have a crapload of people working on it now as well as their own yum update repository instead of pointing at redhat's.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
You're so obviously retarded, I need to work through this one point at a time.
> BAH!!! REDCRAP is the WORST piece of shit I've ever used. We just bought a bunch of
> RHEL 4 AS licenses, and it has been a freaking nightmare. Support sucks, and takes
> it own sweet time if it's not something easily found. And they'll ask you to test things
> out for things that they've confirmed to be issues - WTF? If you FSCKING know it's an
> issue, you can FSCKING TEST IT OUT YOURSELF, damned lazy bastards.
Lazy? Have you any idea how long it could take to *accurately* reproduce a problematic
environment for this kind of work? It may not even be possible. By asking you to help out,
they are helping *YOU* out - FOSS is all about co-operation btw.
> I also like the way they push things off to others. Oh, disk druid is broken? Use fdisk.
> Umm, excuse me, but where's fdisk when I'm trying to install? And why aren't you putting
> in a ticket to engineering to get it fixed?
It's on virtual console 2 (Alt-F2, or Ctrl-Alt-F2 if you're using graphical). Learn to use
the tools in your hands before criticising the help offered by others. Or find out what a
kickstart %pre script is good for.
> And I especially love the way everything is bundled together. So, now, my choice is waste
> 1G of disk space on win2k, or waste 1G of disk space on REDCRAP, when all I'm trying to
> do is run a freaking web server?!
You installed your webserver with a pre-defined package profile? What are you? Fscking crazy?
Learn to do a kickstart like everyone else and have *only* the packages you select.
Oh, wait, you probably don't even know what packages you want or need.
*sharpens the clue-by-four*
> Oh, oh, lets not even mention the fact that RHEL4 can't even run, out of the box, on
> platforms that they advertize for!!!! Yeah, go perform a default install of RHEL4 on a
> dual core opteron, reboot, and watch it hang. Why the fsck do you put in the smp kernel,
> if it doesn't fucking work?
You mean the dual core opterons that weren't even available as engineering samples at the
time RHEL4 was being cut? Ahh, of course, Red Hat should have just used their magic crystal
ball. In the mean time, install update 2 like the rest of the sane world.
Oh, and RHEL doesn't even come in a box. It's a *subscription*. But you knew that right?
> And of course, the support and registration sites going up and down, and taking more than
> 24 hours to get my damned registration in.
Works for me. Perhaps you need to use a working web browser? Or maybe the fault is between
chair and keyboard?
> And lets not talk about how much fun it was doing an up2date to go from RHEL 4 to RHEL 4
> U1 and U2. Freaking dependency failures, and killing the box so bad that it can't reboot,
> and needing a re-install.
OK, now I just don't believe you. Oh, wait, you didn't kill an up2date/RPM process did you?
Or reboot? Bwaahahahahahaaaha HALOF!
> 2. ftp and http both support resumption of downloads, so if REDCRAP's servers can't
> support this, this is a REDCRAP issue, isn't it?
RHN downloads use wget or curl by preference. Please consult the manual pages.
Also, please investigate the carriage return key on your keyboard - it's very useful.
... and as you can read form Red Hat Shares Fall on Analyst Downgrade
...
Red Hat Shares Fall on Analyst Downgrade
Tuesday November 15, 12:01 pm ET
Red Hat Shares Fall 5.5 Percent After Analyst Downgrades Stock on Lacking Near-Term Upside
NEW YORK (AP) -- Shares of Red Hat Inc. dropped 5.5 percent trading Tuesday after an analyst cut his rating on the stock, citing concern that he doesn't anticipate any events that can move the stock price up in the near future.
Shares were down $1.34, to $23.02 in midday trading on the Nasdaq.
and so on
I a unix/linux systems engineer. I can tell you Redhat Linux AS 2.1 was anything but advanced. Sure EMC and Oracle supported it. But there was NO LVM! No Support for Extended ACLS! And the infamous low EMEM bug when you are under heavy I/O. If I compiled a fix in Oracle wasn't going to support it. The servers are Dell PowerEdge 6650's with 8GB RAM connected to an EMC SAN via Qlogic HBAs. I managed to tame the beast, but managing the filesystems without an LVM is a pain.
The ERP project has grown, so when the lease is up on the Dell equipment it looks like we are going with the IBM pSeries. Why... basically we need the I/O.
I've achieved 97% uptime but the credit is mine, not Redhat's. Redhat staff is brain dead when it comes to cutting edge solutions. I solved my problems before Redhat was ever on the trail.
I haven't been able to upgrade to Redhat AS 4.0 since according to the usenet groups Oracle RAC and 10g perform poorly with SAN attached storage, 50% of the throughput I have on the heavily patched Redhat AS 2.1
Bottom line, if you are going to roll out Linux throughtout your Enterprise you need engineers like me on your staff, not Redhat. I believe the public will catch on and the Redhat stock will take a nosedive. Unless they hire engineers with experience in the Enterprise.
They need to take a good solid look. What I am personally looking at is licensing from Oracle. I believe the whole Redhat / Oracle Grid deal is to sell as many oracle licenses as you can. Need more horsepower? Add a database node?
An Additional database node means more money for Ellison, and less money in your IT budget. So we are now looking at
running the backend on a IBM p570 or a p590 and host many
databases there. The business decided that Disaster Recovery is more important than HA! Why... 9iRAC takes 4 minutes to failover. Also.. sometimes failovers fail.
Some of the bugs may have been worked out in 10g.
Anyway have your read the latest news at Oracle? Sun is now the preferred Oracle platform of the month again.
That's not goinf to help redhat's stock.
Believe it or not I've been a Linux fan since 1992.
Yggrasill was the release I cut my teeth on.
I've been using it ever since.
I was very dissapointed to see what redhat did.
This is not only going to hurt Redhat. But then again, Linux was never written with the intent to make money.
It has however helped many Computer scientists and professionals improve on thier careers. It helped me stay on top of my game and earn a decent salary.
I would not recommend buying Redhat Stock.
The P/E ratio is calculated by dividing the share price by the earnings PER SHARE number. As such, it is not affected by stock splits.
For a company earning $10 that has 10 shares out standing and a share price of $10
P/E = share price / (earnings / shares outstanding)
P/E = $10 / ( $10 / 10 ) = 10
after a 2 for 1 split they will still earn $10 but now they have 20 shares trading at $5 each
P/E = $5 / ( $10 / 20 ) = 10
Tada! the same number.
There are reasons not to rely solely on P/E ratios as a company measure but fluctuations due to stock splits is not one of them.
And you'll probably see that kind of growth for a while longer, too. What you're talking about (the span of a year or so) isn't investing... it's speculation. And while I don't deny that Red Hat has had decent returns recently, and may continue to in the near future, the parent said that Red Hat is a "solid" company. My main point of contention is that two years of profit doesn't define a "solid" company in the financial sense, regardless of industry. The dot-coms all had tremendous growth as far as market capitalization goes (stock price), but very few of them had "solid" financials, hence the dot-bomb. New businesses can't even APPLY for most bank loans until they've been open and profitable for at least 3 years (this is coming from a business owner).
I don't respond to AC's.