[LUAU] RedHat/Fedora

Jim Thompson jim at netgate.com
Thu Sep 29 15:00:13 PDT 2005


On Sep 29, 2005, at 7:26 AM, Hawaii Linux Institute wrote:

> Mid of the night and finally got a chance to browse the web.   
> Suddenly, a news alert:  Red Hat shares up 25% (thus pushing its  
> market cap to ~$3.5B, I believe).

It closed up almost 30%.  Market cap $3.79B, but the P/E is 86.10,  
which is in the "insane dot.com" range.   For comparison, CSCO's P/E  
is 20.58, IBM's is 15.7, NOVL's is 7.79, MSFT is 23.08
SUNW's is ... non-existent (negative earnings)

> I am sure everyone remembers this:  Not too long ago, Red Hat was  
> facing the reality of the Internet/Linux bubble and decided to  
> abandon their consumer/desktop versions of Linux as part of their  
> corporate-wide full-retrench strategy to preserve capital and thus  
> to hopefully survive.  It was our lowly local boy Warren who  
> convinced Red Hat to recycle their unwanted surplusage into a  
> community project called Fedora.
>
> Now both Novell and Sun are desperately trying to build their own  
> versions of the Fedora Success (capital "S") model.  Personally, I  
> believe Warren can claim credits for at least 3 of the 3.5B of Red  
> Hat's total market capitalization, but who's count?  :-)  Wayne

Warren is a smart guy, but if he generated $3B of value for RHAT,  
then something is wrong in Raleigh, NC.





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