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 210/2018
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News
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Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 Released
The latest release is focused on hybrid cloud.
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Microsoft Releases a Linux-Based OS
The company is building a new IoT environment powered by Linux.
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Solomon Hykes Leaves Docker
In a surprise move, Solomon Hykes, the creator of Docker has left the company.
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Red Hat Celebrates 25th Anniversary with a New Code Portal
The company announces a GitHub page with links to source code for all its projects
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Gnome 3.28 Released
The latest GNOME rolls out with better contact management and new features for handling virtual machines.
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Install Firefox in a Snap on Linux
Mozilla has picked the Snap package system to deliver its application to Linux users.
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OpenStack Queens Released
The new release comes with new features for mission critical workloads.
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Kali Linux Comes to Windows
The Kali Linux developers even managed to run full blown XFCE desktop via WSL.
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Ubuntu to Start Collecting Some Data with Ubuntu 18.04
It will be an ‘opt-out’ feature.
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CNCF Illuminates Serverless Vision
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation announces a paper describing their model for a serverless ecosystem.