Red Hat Ends Year on High Note

In the last month Red Hat and Fedora have been earning their share of headlines. Besides the new partnerships and infrastructure, Red Hat has released a beta for the upcoming version 7 this month. In addition, Fedora 20 was released, their quarterly earnings were up, and stock prices continue to rise. Phoronix.com has published some end-of-year benchmarks in a comparison test with six distributions including Fedora 20, RHEL 6.5, and RHEL 7 Beta.

Since our last report on Red Hat finances their stock has continued to rise. Expectations after the third-quarterly report were up to $65 a share since earnings beat projections in most areas and is now considered a "Strong Buy" by Zacks. "Red Hat continues to gain market share. We believe that the company has significant growth potential in the public cloud segment over the long term." Today's prices are down .32% to $55.90 a share as of this writing.

In related news, it has been reported that "EVP Michael Cunningham unloaded 20,000 shares of Red Hat stock on the open market in a transaction that occurred on Friday, December 27th. The stock was sold at an average price of $56.25, for a total value of $1,125,000.00." Mark Cook and Jim Whitehurst also sold 42,111 shares this month.

In more fun news, Phoronix.com has performed a six-way distro comparison featuring Fedora 20, RHEL 6.5 & 7 Beta along side contenders Debian 7.2, Ubuntu 14.04 (developmental), and openSUSE 13.1. See the full write-up here.

Some other related posts include Red Hat is Hiring, Welcome to CentOS 7, and Managing Linux with OpenLMI.