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

"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."

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