Red Hat — Stand Alone Or Get Bought?

head_dunce writes "It seems that this economy has inspired a lot of businesses to move to Linux, with Red Hat posting profits that beat everyone's expectations. There's a dark side to being a highly profitable company in a down economy, though — now there are talks of Citigroup and Oracle wanting to buy Red Hat. For a while now, we've been watching Yahoo fend off Carl Icahn and Steve Ballmer so that they could stay independent, but the fight seems to be a huge distraction for Yahoo, with lots of energy (and money) invested. Will Red Hat stay independent? What potential buyer would make for a good parent company?"

Comments

JBoss...

[wandazulu]

Whereas I'm not too concerned about Red Hat Linux (especially since Oracle already has a version of it they brand as their own), my *real* concern is for JBoss, one of the best app servers out there.

If Oracle had not bought BEA, I'd think they'd buy up RH and replace oc4j/App server with JBoss, but since they *did* buy BEA, they now have WebLogic and JRockit; they'd probably just put JBoss out to pasture, which would leave a lot of folks who have deployed JBoss high-n-dry.

Yes, they wouldn't do it right away and yes, there's always the possibility of a fork, but it would make it that much harder of a sell to the boss who wanted to go with JBoss because it was a lot cheaper than what Oracle wanted for their app server.

Re:JBoss...

[Nutria]

they'd probably just put JBoss out to pasture, which would leave a lot of folks who have deployed JBoss high-n-dry.

Just before they sold themselves to Compaq, DEC sold it's self-written DBMSs (the relational Rdb and DBMS, a CODASYL system) to Oracle.

We all thought that Big O would quickly force us all to migrate to RDBMS, but too many Important Customers doing Important Things rely on Rdb/OpenVMS, so 12 years later it's still under active development. (Of course, mostly by greybeards who have been working on it since the 80s...)

Oracle 11g on Linux, though, is winning lots of converts, so I wouldn't be surprised if it "soon" goes into maintenance mode, coasting along another decade until HP finally puts VMS out to pasture.

Re:JBoss...

[rtb61]

I see you really have no understanding of why a big three letter company buys a small company. They buy it because the big company lacks expertise and they are trying to buy it in. Perversely the existing employees at the big three letter company now go into job preservation mode and attempt to undermine and remove (fire or force them to quit) employees of the small company because they threaten the jobs and promotional opportunities of those that have clearly demonstrated their incompetence, after all they had to buy in the expertise because they were incapable of developing it internally.

So rather than a corporation you are dealing with all the individuals in the corporations and their own personal motivations. In corporations you don't get promoted because you are good at your job, you get promoted because you a are good at getting promoted or have relatives in senior executive positions ie. typical corporate politics.

With open source the reality is, if you want it to succeed you must develop it internally you can not buy it in because the existing corporate environment has actively blocked it's internal growth. So the hard bitter way is the only way it really works, retain the windrones that want to retrain, sack the ones that refuse and hire skilled penguinistas where ever you can beg, borrow or steal them from (as their numbers grow they eventually will get cheaper). To get the real growth in open development you need to change the corporate philosophies in those areas and it needs to be done organically to produce quality results.

I would like to see RedHat stay independent

[einhverfr]

I can't think of a good match. Maybe IBM just because IBM's service arm seems to be doing really well, but then that would be bad for the whole industry for IBM to own an enterprise Linux distro.

It would be kinda funny if Microsoft bought them and actually tried to make money off Red Hat Enterprise Linux, though....

Re:RedHat is a dead end

[L7_]

The problem is that people like me install Ubuntu on thier home desktop machine. I understand apt and all of the debian specific configuration file locations.

When I go into work and have to work on the RHEL servers, I can mostly get yum and rpms to work for the server configuration that I want, but god damn if it isn't like pulling teeth.

Now that I have enough power, and I have to make a decision on which distro to get support from, do I go with something that I know (Debian/Ubuntu and Canonical?) or something that is similiar yet foreign (Redhat/RHEL)?

The last 3 servers that I've been in control of have been Ubuntu.

Re:Why is redhat worth so much?

[aztracker1]

If Sun and IBM combined with Oracle and RedHat, that would really make a powerhouse corporation in terms of offering Linux+Java based solutions. It would probably allow for a portfolio to truly compete against MS on most fronts even. I don't necessarily like the idea myself, and am not a big fan of Java itself. But the thought is compelling.

And the winner is...

[MrWin2kMan]

Larry Ellison and Oracle are beginning to lust heavily over Red Hat...I fear most of the best parts of RH would get lost in the catacombs of Oracle and never see the light of day again... Sun seems to be busy playing coquette to IBM (although HP would be a better fit). Novell would be a logical choice and would (finally) promote some consolidation in the Linux realm. Apple already has an OS based on a (flamebait acknowledged) superior Unix derivative. I would instead look to Cisco or Dell. Cisco has no in-house OS (other than IOS of course) and with their recent entry into the server hardware market it would be a smart buy, although not necessarily for RH. Dell would be an ideal combination, as Michael Dell is already a Linux proponent, although of a slightly different flavor. Dell isn't as integrated as their main competitors and has no real software presence, however their close association with Redmond might be a giant monkey wrench. If Dell wanted to grow up and really play with the big boys (the ones who are left anyway), they would grow a pair and go bold. Who else has $4-6 Billion in cash lying around looking for more software presence...Adobe? Google?

Re:Why is redhat worth so much?

[rackserverdeals]

It's not just Solaris.

According to this, in 2006, sun was the leading corporate contributor to open source projects that were in the Debian distro.

Here's another look at Sun's open source contributions.

Re:oh noes.

[indi0144]

Thats because you need an AD campaign not random people talking about random facts with random corporate image from random media at random targets.

For a successful AD ampaign you need:

Creative Team:
A team of people dedicated to the product and the corporation, design guy, copy guy, planning guy and a blue collar guy preventing too much pot smoking and facing the corporate overlords.

Message Personality:
a unified tone of communication: imagine what kind of person would be Linux and how he will sell itself (I know, would be weird, tron guy anyone?)

Corporate image
so that joe sixpack, Juan Perez and Jou Hoa Ling can distinguish Linux from the rest and remember all the Message just looking at a single piece of advertising.

You need to have a media strategy to select which media will go before and after, what media is looking your target Etc.

The target or the future user: what they want and what they think, their expectations and socio economic variables.

As far as I know theres certain bad rap (justified) about marketing people in the IT community thats why I see it so hard for Linux to have the media relevance it deserves but believe me, the random strategy do more harm than good. What you're are trying to create are memes not messages to sell the idea that it's Linux.

If Linux starts to earn market share theres only one option, to advertise. Before the competitors starts to be worried and just dump shitloads of money in PR waiting for the humble penguin to fall in the trap of the n00b. Someone should take responsibility about it and try too create a team of Advertising people "that happens to like linux" and put that shit together once and for all.

I can reaz your mindz and you askz "why should we pay this potsmokers for advertising when no one pays the developers?" Money? you don't need money for Advertising unless you are going for mass media, Guerrilla marketing anyone? I'd volunteer to it and I know theres plenty of other people that would do it. Once theres an strategy set anyone and their uncle can try to make the Ad there will be filters and debug as in the developer world, is not so different.

It's an idea that have been around my head since I first meet Linux and fucking hurts to be so far from the action : (

Re:Typical Slashdot misunderstanding

[Hognoxious]

the linked article is probably under 250 words. Could you not have given it a read?

New here?

FRAUD? Consider the sources.

[Futurepower(R)]

This Slashdot story was posted by a Slashdot editor who calls himself "Souls kill". The story was suggested to Slashdot by someone who calls himself "Head Dunce". A dunce is "a person regarded as stupid". (Please note, I'm not suggesting that the Slashdot editor "kills souls", he is suggesting that. I'm not calling the person who wrote the story a dunce, he is calling himself that.)

The Slashdot story links to an article in Forbes Magazine. Will Forbes and other "financial" publications continue to pretend to offer useful financial advice when they did NOTHING to stop the corruption of big U.S. banks taking on debt 20 to 60 times their assets?

The Forbes article was written by someone named "Ruthie".

The "takeover" talk appears to be completely fraud, in my opinion:

1) Citigroup is not thinking of buying Red Hat. Yes, the Slashdot story suggests that, but the stories to which Slashdot links don't suggest that.

2) Citigroup has been extraordinarily destructive; it helped cause the present job loss throughout the United States. The article implies that Citigroup has a lot of Red Hat stock and is trying to manipulate the price.

3) The Slashdot story links to a Reuters story that says, "Linux software maker Red Hat Inc (RHT.N) reported profit ahead of Street projections on Wednesday , helped by cost cuts and a stock buyback, sending shares up 8 percent." Someone is apparently manipulating the price of Red Hat stock, because "22 cents vs Street view 20 cents" is certainly not news that should cause people to value Red Hat stock so highly that the shares go up 8 per cent.

4) The Reuters story only says that some un-named people on "the Street" predicted something, and Red Hat did a tiny bit better. Remember that "the Street" is responsible for the present job loss throughout the United States. They are, in my opinion, vicious crooks, who stole from and are stealing from the taxpayers because corrupt politicians believe they are "too big to fail".

If you aren't a full time stock investor with plenty of inside information, you should not be buying stocks. Those with little experience just lost 40% of their money!

We deserve better leaders than "Souls kill", "Head Dunce", Forbes, Ruthie, Citigroup, "the Street", and politicians manipulated by those who don't know any better way to make money than by paying to corrupt their own government.

Re:Why is redhat worth so much?

[Anonymous Coward]

On the other hand, the folk who hang out on the CentOS forums are bunch of very helpful people.

My big problem with RedHat is that if some bureaucratic mishap (or malice) stops the payment of your RedHat subscription, you suddenly have a bunch of unpatchable insecure boxes. Sure, you can point yum at the CentOS repos, but if you're going to do that, why pay RedHat in the first place?