castanyes blaves

There is a recent article about Open Source in BussinessWeek:

www.businessweek.com/technology/content/dec2005/tc20051228_262746.htm

Very interesting, indeed.

Investor analysts are very happy with this years performance of RedHat.

And Wall Street is bullish about next year. "Red Hat is one of the best-positioned stocks in software and should be able to further capitalize on the growing demand for open source," wrote Credit Suisse First Boston analyst Jason Maynard in a post-earnings research note.

It is curious to see these big companies evolving. I just found out that RedHat company value doubles the value of Novell Inc.

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=RHAT

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=NOVL

which is something one wouldn't expect if only taking into account how much "buzz" each company makes in the press, or in general.

The article also mentions Firefox.

It mentions the endorsement OSS has received from Dell, Hewlett-Packard, or IBM. And the difficult-to-publicise relationship of Sun, and specially Java, with OSS.

Morotola is also very well positioned in the Mobile OSS front.

At the end, the article talks about Venture Capital and OSS. Time will tell who is who in this world.

My bets?

Well, I have none. But I think that:

IBM is like the mother of OSS big companies, or like the benevolent giant.

RedHat is like the sparky David (vs Goliath). The key is how they grow and keep doing great. Google is a good example of growing and not shitting like everybody else.

Sun Microsystems would be trying to be benevolent like IBM, and they have contributed a lot with Star(Open)Office. But they are like a benevolent giant that keeps a card in the pocket.

Novell is like the reformed-AA everybody can count on nowadays. If you need a friend for a chat, call Novell. They have shown a lot of potential for their short OSS travel, and have even more potential hiding.

On the non-OSS field, a two key players will be Apple and MSFT. Apple is more in the middle-OSS field, but not fully OSS. But Apple has something that MSFT is very scared off: "coolness". They basically sell "coolness". That's why nowadays they basically sell iPods and music. And will sell video and cinema related stuff. But as they recently switched to x86, they can compete in the application world with MSFT. Well, that _if_ they manage to make the "Rosetta" or whatever they call it now, work flawlessly. If they manage to make almost every app available for OSX86, as for MSFT, then MSFT will have to push a lot to show muscle. Maybe MSFT will Open-Source the company. Who the hell would beat MSFT if they turn into a RedHat-like company?

Anyway...

posted by avilella  # 3:01 PM