Novell, Sun, and Red Hat: Three degrees of open source

Apr 23, 2009, 15:03 (0 Talkback[s])
(Other stories by Matt Asay)

"Only Red Hat has managed to thrive as an open-source company while achieving significant scale of revenues.

"Open source, it turns out, proves to be a much easier business strategy for upstarts than incumbents: it's hard to thrive on open-source prices unless your business is architected from the ground up to do so.

"No incumbent technology vendor yet has managed to successfully transform itself into an open-source player, though Sun has tried, and sometimes to very good effect, as its vice president of Lifecycle Marketing, Zack Urlocker, has written."

Complete Story

Related Stories:

• IDC: Linux spending set to boom by 21 percent in 2009(Apr 13, 2009)
• Top Microsoft strategist signals a big change in its IP strategy(Apr 11, 2009)
• Why Mozilla must win the hearts of new Web users(Apr 10, 2009)
• Sun's board may have a lot of explaining to do (Apr 07, 2009)
• Is Ballmer conceding victory to Linux Netbooks?(Mar 23, 2009)
• The quiet Ubuntu Netbook revolution(Mar 18, 2009)