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Will Oracle buy Red Hat?

Anton Philidor 16th Oct 2008

It's reasonable that companies which do not want to expend cash will not make changes to their software. Future gains are less important than current outflow. So Red Hat will probably not gain significantly from the current situation.

But the stock market situation is likely to reduce the share price of Red Hat for some time. Why should that company be any different?

Oracle has shown a willingness to buy open source software companies when sales of the software and use of the customer lists increase profits. And Oracle has already indicated its interest in controlling Red Hat's linux.

So why shouldn't Oracle take advantage of Red Hat's temporary but continuing share price weakness to buy the company and assure the success of its strategy around Red Hat's linux?

That would seem to make business sense. And continue the ongoing process of making open source software only an adjunct to proprietary products.