Red Hat bucks the trend

By Sam Varghese
Tuesday, 09 December 2008 01:55

Opinion and Analysis

At a time when most companies are happy if the balance sheet does not show any red ink, Red Hat Linux has bucked the trend. Its stock price leapt 32 percent last week compared to that a year ago, during a week when technology stocks overall fell by 2.6 percent.
According to information available at Channel Insider, the so-called mixed source company, Novell, saw its stock price fall by 11 percent, the biggest loser of the week.

Novell's fairy godmother, Microsoft, was also among the losers - down 1.7 percent.

All of which makes one think that Red Hat must be doing something right. But, damn it, the company seems to be doing everything which the pundits advise against.

For one, it allows another group, CentOS, to strip the trademarks off its Linux distribution and then give it away free. It's highly unlikely that Novell would stay quiet if this was done with the Linux distribution that it sells.

In other words, Red Hat doesn't try to exert legal muscle against the public. Which company in its right mind would allow this kind of act without suing?

But then, given the nature of Novell's SUSE Linux, it's unlikely that people would want to spend time stripping away trademarks when they could well trip up on patents.

There are fundamental differences between the two companies - Red Hat is an organic open source entity - it has open source in its blood - while Novell has jumped on the Linux bandwagon to stop its figures from trending downwards.