Red Hat — Stand Alone Or Get Bought? 199
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?"
Re:RedHat for the people (Score:4, Informative)
Nonono. Citi is not interested in buying Red Hat. (Score:3, Informative)
That should be made clear.
It was only a Citi analyst that raised the possibility of Red Hat being a takeover target.
Re:Why is redhat worth so much? (Score:5, Informative)
I think you underestimate how involved Red Hat is paying employees to contribute significantly to project components up and down the software stack that makes up the linux ecosystem. I don't think you can really say that all Red Hat does is support stuff they don't build. Their employees are there in the trenches impacting the roadmaps of a lot of components from the kernel on up. Sure Red Hat doesn't do it all, but no one can argue that don't do their fair share of the work in upstream project development.
They succeed as a business model exactly because they can position their development involvement in upstream projects as a value proposition for customers who need critical support services.
There are always going to be complaints about support, nothing is perfect. In fact I doubt one support model fits all possible customer needs..and that's fine. The proof is in the pudding. Red Hat is consistently retaining customer subscriptions in large enough numbers to sustain their business and more importantly for the larger open ecosystem taking that financial support and using it to paying for manhours to sustain the development of open technologies across a broad front of technologies...from the kernel on up.
Re:Why is redhat worth so much? (Score:2, Informative)
Agreed! I fondly remember reading Alan Cox's blog in the 90s about his Linux work while on RH's payroll. He was fixing hard, non-sexy things.
Cheers Alan!
Re:Why is redhat worth so much? (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, Red Hat is the company working most actively on the Linux kernel. Source [linuxfoundation.org] (scroll down to the "Who is Sponsoring the Work" paragraph).