Linux on the stock market

[fingal]

I would say RedHat or Novell. I don't know what Mandriva's about, but the fusion, blabla, I don't have a good impression of them as a company.

They've taken over Connectiva and another company (can't think of their name). They over-recruited when they were a smaller company, and had to make quite a lot of their staff redundant.

At that point they lost a lot of money and faced liquidation. However, they've recovered again, learned a few lessons and they are profitable once more.

[kbk]

My dad is thinking of buying some Red Hat stocks. It seems that VAlinux has just been going down for awhile now. We'll see though eh.

[Dachnaz]

I work to destroy the stock markets in the name of Red. And Pirates. And, communism too. ^.^;

[chopin1810]

I own some RedHat stock actually, around 100 shares. No Novell stock though. It's been a good investment, I haven't gotten a whole lot out of it, maybe a couple hundred dollars in total, but that also means that I haven't really lost anything. So it's a pretty stable company. I might buy some Novell stock soon. But those are the only Linux companies I'll ever invest in, since they are big, stable and reliable. Mandrake has had a very shaky past. And it's funny, I've never used vanilla RedHat even though I'm a shareholder. I have used Fedora Core 4 though and right now I'm on the super-stable CentOS, which is based directly off of the RHEL source code. So I've got RedHat to thank for CentOS really. So I'm a firm supporter of RedHat even though I've never used their actual operating system.
One of my hobbies is investing actually, I usually allocate a couple thousand dollars for it every year.

[kbk]

My dad usually likes buying stocks that pay dividends so he's a little warry about buying Red Hat stock. I've also never used it, I've never even used Fedora, my dad says I'm a hypocrite for trying to get him to buy this stock even though I don't even use what they sell...Novell stock is actually pretty cheap, I was surprised when I looked it up.

[chopin1810]

How cheap is Novell's? RedHat's is at roughly 23 bucks today, it just lost about a dollar. 23 is ok... I'd rather see it a 30 or 40. I don't think Novell would be doing too good, since they just laid off employees. That's never a good sign. And you can tell that RedHat is definatly more business oriented, they have all these links about their company and training etc on their home page. You can tell they really want you to invest.
edit: I just checked, Novell's stock is at 7.50 today, which is pretty low for this sort of thing. I'd need to learn more about the company, but if analysts are starting to predict a rise in price then this would be the perfect time to buy in.

[kbk]

They aren't really predicting much of a rise, it's something like 5% I think. My dad looked it up and everything and Novell isn't doing all that well.

[chopin1810]

Oh well. They still make a good distro.