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

Red Hat is an open-source company, while Novell is not, as Novell’s CEO and CFO both emphasized in Novell’s most recent earnings call. Sun, for its part, was desperately trying to reinvent itself as an open-source company, but struggled to do so given the weight of its declining hardware businesses.

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…

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