“On Monday of this week, Red Hat, a leading seller of Linux
software and services, closed three offices and laid off 20
employees in San Francisco. Red Hat also closed a 15-person office
in Newbury, England, and a five-person office in Cagnes sur Mer,
France.”
“It was all very different just a year ago. When the dotcom
bubble was inflating Red Hat was talking of its “highly successful
initial public offering”. Since then, the bubble has burst and
everything has changed, especially in San Francisco. As reported by
Andrew Orlowski in his ‘Silicon Valley Blues’ column for Computer
Weekly, San Francisco has seen a rise in the supply of recycling
material, exhumed from vacant dotcom offices, delivered via
shopping trolley by vagrant bounty hunters.“
“Linux began as a hobby, an open source version of Unix
developed to run on cheap Intel x86 PCs. The combination of the
cheapness of the platform and the entirely free nature of the code
meant that Linux established a core base of users pretty quickly.
If you needed a dedicated DNS server for your LAN, you could
download it for free and install it on an antiquated system, and
Linux quickly established itself in the server room through this
route.”