Buy Oracle Stock? What of Their Red Hat Takeover?
Rumors of a Red Hat takeover have been circulating since time immemorial. Maybe this time there's some truth to it.
It all began in 2003: Novell buys financially strapped SuSE Linux AG. But their real target even then was Red Hat. Red Hat didn't want to be bought. Comes 2004 and analysts said "Sun, buy Red Hat!" Even better, the rumors in 2005 flew that Microsoft was interested in the Linux distro.
Ever since Oracle set its Unbreakable Linux course in the fall of 2006, speculators have been laying their bets on a Red Hat purchase. At the time, Oracle's CEO Ralph Ellison said in an interview with the Financial Times that his firm was thinking about buying either Novell or Red Hat, but that Red Hat was hardly in their best interests:
"We see in China and India, all that stuff is freely available and Red Hat is just cut completely out of the market. I’m not gong to spend $5bn, or $6bn, for something that can just be so completely wiped off the map. They take all the Red Hat code, have their own equivalent of the Red Hat network, and Red Hat gets zero."
In 2007 the rumor mill again reported that Oracle was to buy Red Hat. In January 2009 analysts came up with an even better plan: Dell should buy Red Hat. And with every speculation Red Hat's stock rapidly rose.
Analysts' assessments at that time maintained that Oracle should wait until Red Hat's stock dips low enough so that it would be easy to snap up. According to a recent ComputerZeitung analyst, that deal is already in the making, although Oracle would probably prefer to wait until IBM's recent talks with Sun resolve themselves, as reported in the WSJ.
The only source of the rumors seems to be U.S. analyst Katherine Egbert of the Jefferies & Co. investment bank. She recently wrote in a Research Note that it would make sense for Oracle to acquire Red Hat. The Boycott Novell people maintain that she "always gets it wrong on Red Hat." We'll see if she hit the jackpot this time.
Issue 199/2017
Buy this issue as a PDF
News
-
Red Hat Announces OpenShift.io
Red Hat takes its IDE online.
-
Microsoft Bakes Linux into Windows Server
Microsoft is slowly becoming a Linux vendor.
-
Fearless Coyote, Linux Kernel 4.11 is Out
The new kernel makes swap implementation more scalable, which will help cloud providers.
-
Docker Appoints Steve Singh CEO
The new CEO comes from a very strong SaaS background.
-
Docker Announces Linux Kit and Moby Project
Both projects help organizations build their own containerized systems.
-
Ubuntu Returns to Gnome as Its Mobile Plans Shatter
Mark Shuttleworth has resumed the position of CEO of Canonical.
-
Microsoft is Shutting Down CodePlex
Microsoft's open source code hosting platform CodePlex will come to an end after a more than 10-year stint.
-
Fedora 26 Alpha Released
Comes with Gnome 3.24
-
Old Linux Kernel Bug Discovered
The bug was introduced back in 2009 and has been lurking around all this time.
-
OpenSSH 7.5 Released
The new release deprecates the sshd_config UsePrivilegeSeparation option.