Summary: Novell's stagnating role versus Red Hat's aggressive hiring

THE Salt Lake Tribune has just published this article about layoffs in its area. Novell is included as well.

OrangeSoda, a fast-growing American Fork company that helps small and midsized businesses drive potential customers to their Web sites, said Wednesday it had laid off 13 percent of its staff of 224. Other recent layoffs have included Move Networks of American Fork, Orem-based iMergent, Digital Technologies International of Springville and Novell of Provo.

There are no specifics disclosed, but could this be related to older layoffs which were followed by apparent offshoring? It was probably German workers who were affected the most, but the latest article is about Provo|Utah. Novell's bad results sure had negative impact, but not quite so for the company's CEO [1, 2].

Novell's failure is not a failure of GNU/Linux however. Novell carries some heavy proprietary baggage and last night we found this report about Red Hat:

Red Hat plans more hiring after adding 600 employees

Despite the worst recession in decades, Linux giant Red Hat added 600 employees to its rolls during the 12 months that ended Feb. 28, and the Raleigh company anticipates more hiring going forward, according to a filing Wednesday with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Novell and Microsoft totally failed to slow Red Hat down. Apple and Microsoft too have their reasons to envy Red Hat. ⬆

“One of the questions I've always hated answering is how do people make money in open source. And I think that Caldera and Red Hat -- and there are a number of other Linux companies going public -- basically show that yes, you can actually make money in the open-source area.”

--Linus Torvalds