"In fact, it may well have been the burden of its IPO that set Red Hat scurrying to marry open-source ideology with hard-headed business acumen, a thought prompted by Red Hat's bizarre history of acquisitions. This history suggests that much of Red Hat's laser-like focus on core infrastructure today may stem from its wild forays into just about everything else in the past.
"In 2000, Red Hat made five acquisitions: Cygnus Solutions (at $674 million, the most expensive by far), Bluecurve, Wirespeed Communications, Hell's Kitchen Systems, and C2Net. From secure Web servers (C2Net) to embedded systems (Cygnus) to e-commerce payment processing (Hell's Kitchen) to software for enabling wireless devices to communicate with the Internet and private networks (Wirespeed) to performance management (Bluecurve), Red Hat's acquisitions were scatter-shot and, ultimately, mostly a failure."
