>”My guess? Hybrid business models are not an easy game to play.”

I definitely agree with you Roberto.

But with the amount of money traditional software vendors have at their disposal, I’d say it’s more likely that they’d buy their open source counterparts before going open source with all their products.

I guess we’ll see

Let’s see what people say about Oracle buying Red Hat:

Ellison while speculating about a move into the Linux business is worried about the lack of IP ownership:

“We’re missing an operating system. You could argue that it makes a lot of sense for us to look at distributing and supporting Linux; it makes a lot of sense. That’s the one area where Oracle isn’t a player. We looked at buying Novell, for instance: we look at everything, play this thing out. IBM is Novell’s biggest customer. We buy Novell, IBM says thanks very much, takes the source code and boom, there goes all our money down the drain on day one”

Raven Zachary, from the 451 Group, suggested Ellison was trying to drive down Red Hat’s market capitalization:

“Given the amount of drama involving the PeopleSoft acquisition, you can’t rule out the possibility that this is a move by Oracle to make Red Hat a more affordable acquisition target”

My guess? Hybrid business models are not an easy game to play.

I totally agree that Red Hat’s future is going to be very interesting. The more they grow into Middleware (IBM, Oracle) and Applications (Oracle), the more that they stand to compete with IBM & Oracle, two vendors who helped Red Hat grow. To be sure, IBM and Oracle (amongst other traditional IT vendors) have benefited extensively from the success of Linux, Red Hat and the acceptance of Open Source.

I’ll make the “bold” prediction that Red Hat will be acquired by, or merge with, a traditional software vendor within the next 5 years. I say “bold” with a laugh, because we’ve already seen news about Oracle possibly acquiring Red Hat.

As the acceptance of open source grows, I believe that traditional software vendors will either acquire open source vendors or build open source divisions to meet customer needs. When this happens, we’ll see a hybrid open source & traditional software business model.

Exciting times to come!