Red Hat IPO Rumors on news.com

fruviad sent us a link to a story over at news.com talking about Red Hat's New COO that will be starting Monday, and talks about unconfirmed IPO rumors for what they call the "Darling of the Linux world".

Comments

So true

[Codifex Maximus]

But... RedHat already has commercial investors that in turn have their investors. At this point in the game, I think most investors involved are knowledgeable about the alternative to a level playing field in the OS game. Extinction! They are investing in something that is a real or potential benefit to their continued survival.

Going "Public", on the other hand, is a different animal altogether. The positive aspects of which would be pubilc involvement in the free and open source community, the availability of an investment point for those interested in Linux's continued growth and their own personal profit, the influx of cash that could provide a boost to R&D, the increased competition to provide for better and more widespread services for Linux customers. The negative aspects could be the alteration of the decision making process as others have pointed out and the proprietization of certain components of commercial distributions - however, in well run companies, a market analysis is done to determine the customer makeup - and if RedHat's customers are expecting adhereance to free and open software standards then that is *HOPEFULLY* what the CEO will ensure.

Microsoft used to have a very large - very technical userbase. To a degree, they still have a goodly mindshare but only because of the profit motive. Many of the technical protagonists that Microsoft used to depend on as customers have literally *Migrated* to Linux and become antagonists. Is such a migration something that a profit minded RedHat is willing to endure? Who knows?

On the flip side, look at Caldera. For the longest time, they have been marketing to the business crowd and succeeding on a moderate scale; now they are targeting a different market segment with their newest release - newbies. They may lose some technical users but gain many non-technical ones. They are a corporation that is looking for profit!

Money for Linux can't be a bad thing... It may change the goals of some companies but as long as they sell a product based on GPL work, it can't be all bad. The whole community benefits from modifications they make that in turn get used by other corporations who make modifications that in turn get released to the community and so on ad-infinitum. The best possible benefit *I* can see is corporate sponsorship of Free Software/Open Source projects and additional hiring of programmers to work on such projects. I consider getting paid to work on Open Source projects to be a kind of sponsorship; creating more time for Open Source work - accelerating the process.

Are we sure we want Red Hat to go public?

[Mike_Miller]

Keep in mind a good point that JWZ mentioned in http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/aol.html :

Bear in mind that, for a publicly-traded company, if a CEO makes a decision because it's the right thing rather than because it's the most profitable thing for the shareholders, he will lose his job, and possibly be sued into oblivion. That's the way the rules work.

If Red Hat goes public, things might not change for the better.

Just something to think about...