Redhat taking a beating - stock opportunity here?

[Evan Leibovitch]

ted leslie wrote:
> hard to believe in one month redhat has gone down nearly 50%! (i.e. 27
> down to 14)
>
> due to Oracle?
>   
Yes.

> if oracle was going to acquire redhat, they have a good plan!!
>   
Oracle is taking a page from IBM's book: Don't waste your time on the
heavy lifting of making your own distribution. Let someone else do it,
but then offer your own training/support infrastructure, because that's
where the money is. It's the rebirth of Linuxcare.

The superficial news is that Red Hat benefits because of Oracle's
support. The move makes Red Hat's software more popular and helps the
brand, but it also added a huge new competitor to Red Hat in the
lucrative fields of Linux support, training and custom development. Now
Oracle and HP can walk into a big enterprise customer to pitch Linux,
and Red Hat's only role is to move some boxed software.

> I am agonizing here on whether to buy Redhat stock! If oracle then buys it, its likely to double!
>   
May be, but arguably Oracle has the best of both worlds this way. Oracle
gets to profit from the Red Hat name without the expense of buying Red Hat.

Meanwhile, Red Hat itself would arguably suffer greatly from an Oracle
aquisition, because its ties with IBM would be immediately severed. This
would push IBM deeper into partnership with Novell (now THAT would be an
interesting aquisition!), or energize the emerging relationship between
IBM and Canonical.

- Evan

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