“Investors in the stock market don’t always immediately reward
the progress of a company or industry. That seems to be the case
with Linux.” … If we ignore the stock market and look at the
shipments and acceptance of the software, it was a good year [for
Linux,]” said Dan Kusnetzky, vice president of systems software
research at International Data Corp.”
“Red Hat continues to move toward the goal it set in June to
become profitable in 2001. The company posted a net loss from its
ongoing business of $900,000 or 1 cent per share for the quarter
that ended Nov. 30. Revenue grew 21 percent over the previous
quarter to $22.4 million.”
“Companies like Sun Microsystems and IBM also continue to swing
their support behind Linux. Sun made a suite of office productivity
programs, including a word processor, available for use on
computers running Linux, and IBM has made all of its server
software available to Linux users. IBM chairman Lou Gerstner also
announced in December that Big Blue would invest $1 billion to
develop, support and market Linux by the end of this year. For IBM,
supporting Linux is a competitive decision. “