Red Hat Is Now Part of the S&P 500

phantomfive writes "Red Hat has made it onto the S&P 500, an important measure of the stock market. It is replacing CIT, which is expected to go bankrupt after the government refused to bail them out. Red Hat is the first Linux company to make it on to the S&P 500. While this means little directly for the company, it is an indication of the importance Linux is taking on in the world."

Comments

Re:de-spin

[girlintraining]

So yeah, it's a big win for open source because it shows that you can make it to the S&P 500 by being an open source company.

The index, industry, and business world in general, doesn't give two sh--s whether something is open source or not. It may be an ideological victory of sorts, but calling it a "big win"? No. It's like graduating from fifth grade and moving on to middle school... It might be a big deal to the kids involved, but to the rest of the world? Not exactly bragging rights. All that said, I really wish I'd had the money to invest in Redhat when it sent me its IPO e-mail several years ago for being an open source contributor. :)