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Public Open Source Companies: Much Ado About Nothing?

Posted by sakgarg on · 2 comments
OStatic; By Sam Dean 		Mail this story
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I mentioned that Red Hat, Novell and Sun Microsystems now have such incredibly low market capitalizations that the independent existence of these open source leaders is threatened. The situation is substantially worse a few days later, with Red Hat's share price more than 20 percent lower than it was when I wrote the original post, starting to look like a penny stock. Some readers have suggested that Red Hat, in particular, is a nebulous entity that represents "nothing in the end." Really?

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Comments (2)

Steven_Rosenber ·
You'd think that Oracle would pull the trigger now on a Red Hat acquisition. I don't know what shape HP or Dell are in, but buying RH could work for them, too.
jdixon ·
You can't just buy a publicly traded company. You have to convince the board of directors to sell, or stage an hostile takeover and replace the board of directors with ones who will agree to the sale. In most companies, the sale also has to be approved by the shareholders. I own 15 shares of Red Hat. Do you think I'd agree to them being purchased by Oracle? Far more importantly, do you thing Bob Young would agree? Do you think any Red Hat employees (who probably own a significant percentage of shares) would agree?

Yes, it could happen, but it's not a simple matter.

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