At around 27/10/06 9:59 pm, Michael Perelman wrote:
> It appears that Red Hat stock is in freefall now that Oracle announced that
> it would
> offer identical services at 50% the cost. I don't know enough to understand
> how
> much Red Hat contributes to the open source movement, but I am suspicious that
> anything good can come from Red Hat tactic.
>
I do not follow stocks at all and I am not much interested in Oracle, so
perhaps you can tell us more about Oracle's announcement? Last I heard
Ellison was making noises about releasing his own flavour of Linux,
amidst rumours of Oracle acquiring RedHat, along with Oracle's advances
towards other distros like Ubuntu.
Without knowing a lot about the recent events, my guess at the cause of
RedHat's Wall Street woes would be their weak positioning now that all
the big guys (IBM, HP, etc) have jumped onto the Linux bandwagon.
Especially IBM. Then there is Novell trying to stay alive, Sun with its
resurgent open source OS, *BSD living strong, not to forget freaking
Apple getting into the server space!
Linux is just 20% of open source. RedHat, did include among its
employees many of the original contributors to some of the most
important GNU/Open-source tools... back from the Cygnus days... a part
of which they continue to work on.
The fork of the RedHat distribution a few years ago into the commercial,
supported Enterprise Linux and the community supported Fedora project
probably hastened the end of RedHat's image as the de facto Linux
distribution.
The focus and momentum has shifted elsewhere, earlier on to Gentoo or
Debian, and then on to applications and servers such as the Apache
Project, and so on.
It's funny... even as Raymond and gang are going on about the need for
compromise (with corporations) etc, while the matter is already beyond
them (as the crazy irony of the SCO v IBM lawsuit demonstrates), the
seemingly anachronistic Stallman seems more relevant today.
--ravi
