Re: Red Hat on the S&P 500 is a sign of Linux maturity

["Robert G. (Doc) Savage" <dsavage@peaknet.net>]

On Wed, 2009-07-22 at 09:36 -0500, Nathan Nutter wrote:
> http://blog.internetnews.com/skerner/2009/07/red-hat-joins-sp-500-a-sign-of.html

True, but probably not in the way you meant. It's more of a statement
about Red Hat's business model than about any particular merits Linux
may have. Red Hat has managed to quantify in monetary terms the value of
professional maintenance and integration of free & open source software
in an organized distribution. If you use a computer operating system and
applications in your business or home, you'll pay an annual service fee
to have someone (in this case Red Hat) fix any problems that may be
found. These generally take two forms: function (bugs) or security
(vulnerabilities). The fees Red Hat collects go to pay thousands of
programmers, managers, and support personnel (HR, marketing, legal,
etc.). If you do a good enough job balancing those incomes and expenses,
and are a publicly owned firm, Standard & Poors just might select you as
one of the 500 companies whose aggregate stock prices form its benchmark
economic index.

--Doc

P.S. In the spirit of full disclosure, I am a Red Hat customer (one
RHEL5 Server basic subscription) and have been a stockholder since their
IPO. Today its stock price clawed its way back from an all-time low of
$7.50/share last Thanksgiving to within 13 cents of what I paid for it
in August 1999. Its share price has jumped 10% since it was added to the
S&P 500 on Monday. It still has a LONG way to go to match its $110/share
peak before 9/11.


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