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Public Open Source Companies: Much Ado About Nothing?

The other day, in the post How Low Can Public Open Source Companies Go? I mentioned that Red Hat, Novell and Sun Microsystems now have such incredibly low market capitalizations that the independent existence of these open source leaders is threatened. The situation is substantially worse a few days later, with Red Hat's share price more than 20 percent lower than it was when I wrote the original post, starting to look like a penny stock. Some readers have suggested that Red Hat, in particular, is a nebulous entity that represents nothing in the end. Really?


How Low Can Public Open Source Companies Go?

While I remain in agreement with many observers who see the economic downturn as potentially very positive for open source, I have to wonder whether we're going to see some of the leadership open source companies swallowed up in all the financial carnage. Red Hat, Novell, and Sun Microsystems are all companies that I'd like to see continue their open source leadership without the meddling of huge corporate parents, but one has to wonder how cheap these companies can get in the public market before their independence is threatened.


Filling the Open Source Usability Testing Gap

Could open source software benefit from more usability testing? It sure seems so, and usability labs are heavily emphasized at big proprietary software companies, especially Microsoft.? In fact, early interface standards in Windows applications, such as common menu options, were largely driven by the experiences of usability testers. Here are some open source projects that are setting a good example when it comes to usability.


OStatic Buffer Overflow.....

Open source and the bottom line.....

Dell teams with Red Hat on enterprise Linux.....

Nine attitude problems in free and open software.....

Netbooks a challenge and opportunity for Linux.....

Novell and Sun as private companies?.....



LiMo and Linux Phones: Are Enterprises the Target?

ZDNet U.K. is out with some interesting analysis of the LiMo Foundation's announcement that Verizon Wireless, Mozilla and several other organizations are joining up with it. According to the ZDNet U.K. report, there may be some moves afoot by two of the very well-known Linux distribution companies that currently operate in the enterprise space to join LiMo and combine mobile open source applications on Linux phones with enterprise open source deployments.



Open Source Doesn't Need Billionaires

Andy Patrizio, over at InternetNews.com, is trotting out that tired old question once again: where are the open source billionaires? as if that was somehow relevant or necessary for open source to be worthwhile. Patrizio also suggests that open source is being carried by large vendors, but doesn't seem to grasp the benefits that the vendors are getting out of open source.



Consumer Desktop Linux from Red Hat? Fuhgeddaboudit...

In case you were wondering, Red Hat--fresh off a rosy earnings report that was interpreted by analysts as a welcoming present for new CEO Jim Whitehurst--won't deliver a desktop product for consumers anytime soon. In a news post at the company's site, team members write: We have no plans to create a traditional desktop product for the consumer market in the foreseeable future.

While there has been much speculation that Red Hat might target the consumer desktop, I'm not surprised by this news. Why isn't the company delivering such a product? Because it doesn't need to.



The Linux Kernel Team Grows--No End in Sight

Recently, I was talking to a tech journalist friend of mine who has been covering Microsoft since the company's inception. He made the point that nobody at Microsoft knows the whole code base of the Windows operating system anymore. Individuals once did, but the operating system is a big ball of code that no single developer knows from end to end.

That was the thought that came to mind when I saw the just-released survey on Linux Kernel Development from the Linux Foundation. The survey provides an exhaustive and fascinating glimpse at what it describes as one of the largest cooperative software projects ever attempted.