Any bets ? How about Novell & Sun ?

> Sun revenues were $13.8bn in 2008 while Red Hat's were less than four per cent of this at $0.52bn

Well, Sun's turnover may have been $13bn but it's falling (at annuallised 7% quarter on quarter) and their profits were seriously negative (depending which measure you use). Meanwhile Red Hat is growing revenue and profitable (source for both: Yahoo Finance).

So of course JAVA is falling (down 20% over 3 months) while RHT is rising (up 20% over the last 3 months) - compared to NASDAQ down ~9%. Look at 6 months and RHT is down "only" 35% - comparable to NASDAQ index - while JAVA is down around 65%.

All shows investors are rational - they sell the poorly performing/value destroying and buy the better performing shares.

Regards Nigel

What does Red Hat do again? A Linux reseller or something, yes?

Oooh, is this the latest version of the long-running game "Guess who's gonna buy Sun"? Now the Sunshiners have lost FSC as the White Knight option, and their fantasizing over an Apple-Sun "merger of tech giants" has turned out to be a pipedream (note to Sunshiners - Jobs has an hormone imbalance, not a brain tumour), is Novell the new name to be undesireably linked to Sun?

Hmmmm, the acid test here would be what would Novell gain from this? Novell is a software company, why would they want to merge with a struggling hardware vendor with only one server line that actually runs the SLES product, and a whole raft of incompatible software? Novell wouldn't even benefit from the Sun customer base as that's mainly old SPARC Slowaris and just as likely to jump to another UNIX or Red Hat as port to SLES. Oh dear, I don't think the Sunshiners thought this idea through too well. If there is anything in Sun that is of interst to Novell (maybe some patents and some of the coders) then Novell will probably wait until Southern Asset Management kick off the fire-sale to get what they want cheap rather than being lumbered with the albatross that is the rest of Sun.

Unfortunately for the Sunshiners, this also seems to hold true with just about anyone else in the market - anyone who might have the cash doesn't seem to have a reason to want the pain that would go with it. Maybe Ponytail can find a rich Sheikh or Saudi Prince with enough oil-money and too little sense. After all, one was silly enough to buy Man City FC.....

Did Sun take your puppy away / reject you for a job or something?

All that your posts show (as much as you may deny it to yourself) is that you know how to spit venom, while "cleverly" changing product names in a repeated (and boring) fashion.

Yes, yes - you don't like Sun. WE GET IT.

If Sun does go away, will you finally put this sock away?

Make sure that you threaten to have my info hunted down in your follow up - we wouldn't want to keep the classy trend you started in another post to stop or anything.

Paris - because even her fights with former BFFs don't last this long.

"Make sure that you threaten to have my info hunted down in your follow up - we wouldn't want to keep the classy trend you started in another post to stop or anything."

Yeah, exactly :-D Matty is going to be tracking IP addresses and making personal phonecalls to each and every ISP with all the spare time he gets in his "real job" (lol) from using HP Openview and blah blah blah...

Classic stuff!

"Did Sun take your puppy away / reject you for a job or something?..." We've been over this before, what are you guys, goldfish? I have never applied for a job with Sun and, in its current state, I can't see a reason why anyone would. Mind you, the puppy-napping angle is new - is this a new Sun sales ploy, "Buy our servers and software or the puppy gets it!"? Rest assured, the family pooch is very alive.

"....Make sure that you threaten to have my info hunted down in your follow up - we wouldn't want to keep the classy trend you started in another post to stop or anything....." Actually, if I remember correctly, it was you Sunshiners that got all huffy and accused me of posting as Jonathan Schwartz, saying that Sun would sue me, etc, etc. I didn't threaten you with anything, I merely warned you to be careful with such insults as "retarded" as some sites expressly prohibit the mocking of the handicapped, and I wouldn't want the fun others would have laughing at your posts to be inhibited by you being banned from any forums. To be honest, I have no intention of tracking any of you Sunshiners down, in fact I would go out of my way to avoid ever meeting any of you! After all, why would I want to? You are all so obviously socially-lacking, it would probably rank as the second most boring episode of my life (first would still probably go to that Apple convention I once went to).

All I can say is that whilst your bitterness and paranoia are common amongst Sunshiners, maybe it's time you admitted to yourselves it is born out of fear. The crux upon which you have based your technical carreers is about to disappear, and you haven't a clue how to move on seeing as you have spent years developing an arrogant and autonomic rejection of any other option as a viable alternative technology.

But to get back to the point of the article, it is a fact that the market sees Red Hat as a software company with a viable future, and ranks it financially as more viable than the much larger and historically more important (or maybe that's self-important?) Sun. This is all the more amusing given Sun's history of fearing and then courting and then fearing Red Hat again, whilst hp and IBM both made the smarter plays of not trying to fight the Linux community but of engaging with them. You can sit there desperately holding yout Sunshiner Blindfolds™ to your eyes to avoid having to admit the truth, but it's till the fact of the matter. Enjoy!

And why is this in the hardware category? What hardware does RedHat sell???

Oh yes -- that is the whole point isn't it?

Would you care to remind us of the innovations that RedHat have brought to the market over the past 25 years? Aside from re-packaging a free operating system, what else do they actually *produce*?

Well, apart from the work they have put into Linux apps and developing a Linux support solution? But I see this is more Sunshiner arrogance - "Red Hat don't 'innovate' like we do!" What you don't get is that innovation is only a success when it makes money. Sun innovates but not products the market actually wants anymore. In the meantime, 90% of other companies that don't innovate but make me-too products or services go on making money. Which is smarter? Maybe you should ask the Sun employees being pink-slipped.

"Would you care to remind us of the innovations that RedHat have brought to the market over the past 25 years? Aside from re-packaging a free operating system, what else do they actually *produce*?"

He's not going to, quite simply because he's clearly incapable of doing so. And, has demonstrated that to the amusement and dismay (lol) of El Reg's readership over, and over, and over again. Note how he spent a whole paragraph *not* answering your question, and simply added to the close to 900 words he's already spouted in this story alone :D

BTW Neil I'm still as in the dark as much as you are about what RH actually do.

To put all this in perspective, as of the stock market close last Friday, January 23, General Motors' market cap was $2.13B with revenues of $166.1B vs. Sun's market cap of $2.73B with revenues of $13.65B.

So what does it all mean? If I knew, I'd be rich....

(Paris, because she knows just as much a the stock market analysts....)

"....Note how he spent a whole paragraph *not* answering your question..." Oh, I'm sorry, did I use too many long words for you? OK, I'll say it simply, just for you and the rest of the first-graders; the financial market believes Red Hat makes more money and will continue to make more money than Sun. That is the whole point of the article. You can moan and grate on about "innovation" and comparisons with GM (you're so desperate you're comparing yourself to the biggest carwreck in the automotive industry!?!?!), but the facts still remain the same - Sun is considered a bad investment by the people with the money, and that will directly impact on Sun's ability to raise funds, sell shares and - most importantly - will lead many customers to question whether buying their producst is a good idea.

On the innovation front, apart from the fact Red Hat have innovated profit, something Sun are having a real problem doing, I would just like to point out that Red Hat has carefully and successfully integrated Xen into RHEL, whereas as Sun have failed so far with Slowaris x86 and xVM, as outlined by The Reg; http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/16/sun_touts_virt_galaxies/. Try again, Sunshiners!

"...Red Hat has carefully and successfully integrated Xen into RHEL, whereas as Sun have failed so far with Slowaris x86 and xVM..."

What a great example, thank you !! And so did Novell and Oracle ..or pick any Linux distro...

What a pathetic failure would it be..., to not collect and package the bits and pieces together since all the work is already done by the Xen folks !! Wait a minute, does Redhat employ the Xen guys too ? Well, they did build a reasonably good management interface to manage the VMs - kudos to them.

Redhat is so happy with their achievement of bundling Xen package that they suddenly decided to embrace KVM instead and ditch Xen !!

Consider the contrary that Sun is actually making the entire paravirtualized solaris on their own with little help from the Xen folks. The Xen folks did all the work for Linux only, not solaris - but how would you know :-(

Did HP manage to port HP-UX on Itanic ? What a shame that they don't have a type-1 hypervisor for their high end boxes, may be you could convince your bosses at HP to invest in some real engineering and get a proper hypervisor on the Itanic - pity for them that they can't just lift the magical HP-UX port from some open-source project, was that too much effort considering the Xen guys already have a port of Xen hypervisor on the Itanic ? Or may be HP can just stop promoting Vmware ESX hypervisor and ask their customers to use Vmware server instead - after all it would resonate perfectly with their hypervisor strategy on the Itanic gears.

RE: RE: Matt Bryant - Redhat & Xen

"....Redhat is so happy with their achievement of bundling Xen package that they suddenly decided to embrace KVM instead and ditch Xen !!..." Actually, that had more to do with Citrix buying VMware, which meant Red Hat could no longer be assured of equal access to code or updates should Citrix get cuddly with another vendor, and because they decided KVM would give them both a competitive edge and a unique offering.

"....Did HP manage to port HP-UX on Itanic ?...." Erm, yes, a long time ago. Do you actually know anything about hp-ux?

"....What a shame that they don't have a type-1 hypervisor for their high end boxes,..." Hmmm, lets see now - they had software (vpars) and hardware (npars) partitioning for PA-RISC long before Sun had either on Slowaris, and then they got hardware partitions and Integrity Virtual Machines out and working for Itanium before Sun had anything like it for Slowaris. I think you need to go back and do a little research.

"....pity for them that they can't just lift the magical HP-UX port from some open-source project, was that too much effort considering the Xen guys already have a port of Xen hypervisor on the Itanic ?...." Well, considering they didn't need it for Itanium as Integrity Vritual Machines already did what VMware ESX or Xen do there wasn't the need. However, you can load Red Hat onto an Integrity server and fire up Xen if you want, it is fully supported and works (unlike xVM).

RE: Twatt Bryant

"....Seriously, does anyone have any further doubt or need any more proof as to how old this guy is?...." I suppose the fact I can use words of more than one syllable does probably put me at an older age group than you and your fellow playground buddies. The funny bit is I have embraced new technologies whilst you still cling blindly to the dinosaur of modern computing. In the parlance of the playground - suck on that, doofus - pwned!

I want Sun to die, just so Matt can go back under his rock.

Simple - the high-end is where the major deals are struck, those deals are margin-rich and loaded with support options and services that mean the actual sale can be two or more times the value of the hardware. That hihg-end is still dominated by commercial UNIX and probably will still be for a few years to come, so being top dog in hihg-end UNIX means being the dog with the biggest profits. That is why hp-ux is not doomed, because it still makes hp enough money for them to invest in its development and make a profit.

"....To be honest, OpenSolaris is the way to go...." Which is why it is being ignored by the community and by the commercial market. Face it, CentOS is more popular. How few downloads has Sun turned into support contracts? A pittance. OpenSolaris is just another drain on Sun's dwindling resources in a vain attempt to defeat Linux.