“Red Hat Inc., the top distributor of the Linux software
operating system, Wednesday said it will buy Hell’s Kitchen
Systems, a maker of software for electronic commerce payment
processing, for nearly $97 million in stock….”
“Young said the inclusion of an efficient, low-cost payment
processing system would allow small businesses and departments in
large companies to create Web sites with the same commerce features
of major Web sites — in other words, the mainstream market
that does not now have access to reliable and low-cost credit
card-processing services.
“We see this as simply technology and it’s a necessary
technology that needs to be embedded,” Young said. “It really is
for the mass of merchants who want to be on the `Net but haven’t
the tens of millions of dollars that a major merchant like Land’s
End has to invest in electronic commerce systems.”