Red Hat & VA IPO Speculation by CNET

diogenes write in to send us a CNet article that speculates wildly about the IPO Intentions of Linux Heavyweights Red Hat and VA Linux Systems. Red Hat denies it (as always) and VA Speculates (as always). Mentions Mandrake working at VA and wraps up with a bit about Cygnus. I wonder where Linuxcare fits into all this, but other than that, this a good summary of the picture right now.

Comments

Do they need to?

[Fizgig]

Do they even need to go public? As much as I would like them to offer me a job and make me rich, do they even need to go public? They have people like Netscape/AOL and IBM investing in them. They can live off that pretty well and continue to grow. The only reasons they would need to go public (correct me if I'm wrong) would be to raise more capital, which they seem to have plenty of, or to have their stock go sky-high and then bail out. This is what tech companies tend to do, but why should they? If Linux really is the next-big-thing, they can just wait until it really takes off, and then both Red Hat and VA (as well as their long-time employees) should be raking in big dough on their own merit, not because of the overspeculation of a million tech-hyper investors. Am I wrong here? Why should they go public? They have more than enough momentum and private investment that they can survive quite well until they hit the big time. True, they could become a billion-dollar company overnight if they went public, but they wouldn't own as much of that company any more. Why not wait a few years and try to become the billion-dollar company on their own merit?