Public Open Source Companies: Much Ado About Nothing?

I mentioned that Red Hat, Novell and Sun Microsystems now have such incredibly low market capitalizations that the independent existence of these open source leaders is threatened. The situation is substantially worse a few days later, with Red Hat’s share price more than 20 percent lower than it was when I wrote the original post, starting to look like a penny stock. Some readers have suggested that Red Hat, in particular, is a nebulous entity that represents “nothing in the end.” Really?