Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Pastimes : CNBC -- critique. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sam Citron who wrote (12605)	11/14/2003 1:18:37 PM
From: Lizzie Tudor	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17683

Hi Sam! re: NOVL Actually as I am sure you probably know, almost NONE of Novl's current revenue comes from open source. Some of it does, because they acquired Ximian this year which was a Linux vendor but my guess is that % of their revenue is small. Most of the software revenue for NOVL comes from their dying legacy products. However, they have a large services arm (they acquired a consulting company a while ago... digital think or something?)- and from what I understand the consulting biz at Novl does a lot of open source business. So as far as comparing Novl to RHAT, I'd say they are both very expensive based on the portion of revenues derived from actual Linux. The advantage NOVL has over RHAT at this stage is their cash position, and the IBM investment, and NOVL expertise in desktop service/support. RHAT spun off the desktop Linux product into an unsupported distro called Fedora, meaning they don't care about desktop. I suspect NOVL will hit desktop hard with the help of IBM and other industry partners with an aim of weakening Microsoft. I'm sure you know that some people think there is no money to be made in Linux so you are fighting that perception if you invest in either company. Re: Oracle I work with a bunch of offshore indian teams and my sense is that India's tech workforce is exploding just like SV in the 90s. Therefore, the teams are green, and at this moment the expertise here in the US on Oracle is better than India. That is my personal observation only. But the fact is that Oracle moved their R&D facility to India and companies like Applied can hire offshore workers for 1/3 US cost. Therefore why bother with Oracle licenses in the US, if I were a CEO I wouldn't hire locally for Oracle either. I don't think Oracle did this deliberately fwiw. I think Larry is crying the blues about the maturity of the industry when in fact his real problem is he offshored his own company away. If I weren't 40 years old, I would start a company based on MySQL with an open source and distro model and scale up to enterprise, in the US. Small US companies today don't want to work with india for development.