On 10 Mar 2003, seth vidal wrote: > In that regard I'd suggest that those of you using yum instead of > rhn/up2date buy some red hat stock. It's selling at ~$6 a share so it's > quite affordable. You help their market capitalization when you do that > so you're inherently helping the company. And you get to be a > shareholder. Actually, you don't help their capitalization unless they are selling the stock as a new offering. You are just trading around existing stock. The best you might be doing is putting money in the pockets of somebody in the company cashing options or stock, more likely in the pockets of an investor with no relationship with the company at all. Just a nitpick. I actually think it is a decent investment, but don't buy it to somehow give RH more operating capital. If you wan't to do that, pay RH (somehow, at some level) for a copy of the distribution or support for same, even if you never plan to use the support. That gives the a revenue stream and helps increase their "profit". This both makes shareholders happy with their existing business model and will cause the price of their stock to increase. This, in turn means that they CAN raise more money, if they need to, with a new public offering of more shares, or more likely means that they won't need to. I actually think this is an ethical thing to do. I don't "buy" every new release that comes out, but I do buy a "copy" of RH somewhere, somehow, something like every other major release number. > We'd all be in a different world from a systems administration > standpoint w/o red hat - so I for one encourage people to buy their > stuff. They've got a lot of good folks working for them and the longer > they stay in business the better for the rest of us. Absolutely. Even if you work out a way to pay them only $10 or so per major release, the money adds up and is totally fair for the value they add packaging it all up and baseline supporting it. Unlike the "value" one gets for 10x the money from certain other alternative environments. It's kind of like the honor system... rgb -- Robert G. Brown http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/ Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305 Durham, N.C. 27708-0305 Phone: 1-919-660-2567 Fax: 919-660-2525 email:rgb@xxxxxxxxxxxx
