Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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....
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
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.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
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?
Nothing to see here but us trolls...move along...
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.
Dual Opteron < $600
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.