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As Matt Asay notes, Red Hat's financial performance has been much rosier during the recession, but there are also questions arising about why Red Hat's revenue growth is slowing. Both companies need more than just Linux business to grow over the long run, and there are good reasons to believe that Red Hat may be the one of the two that pulls a rabbit--or a series of them--out of its red hat.

Novell's report yesterday was preceded by a drop in its stock price, and as I write this, the stock is down another seven percent. It didn't meet revenue expectations despite strength in its Linux business. Meanwhile, Matt Aslett has some interesting charts here showing how Red Hat's rate of revenue growth has been declining. Despite that worrisome note, he points out that Red Hat's two major acquisitions in recent years (JBoss and Qumranet) both provide opportunities for the company to drive organic growth. Acquisitions are important for long-term growth, and Red Hat has made good ones.

Red Hat's middleware business, led by JBoss, is actually growing faster than its Linux business. Novell can't point to anything growing faster than its Linux business. To really understand Red Hat's consistency, though, it's wise to look at how the company focuses on investing. In this post, based on some good analysis from Savio Rodrigues, we discussed how over the past two years, Red Hat has derived a whopping 48 percent of its income before taxes from what it classifies as "Other Income." A close analysis of what "Other Income" means reveals that Red Hat steadily earns interest income from, and gets capital gains on investments made with its nearly $800 million in cash. Think about that percentage of its steadily growing earnings for a minute: 48 percent--almost half.

Novell has $1 billion in cash, but its pattern of investment of that cash is more in line with how other software companies operate, and it's atypical for software companies to derive more than 10 percent of their earnings from "Other Income." In short, Red Hat can be characterized as a financial institution that is also a successful software and services company. With JBoss and Qumranet, it can also grow its business in ways that Novell currently can't.

Novell's challenge going forward is going to be finding some successful path to follow outside of its Linux business. If that path is going to be found through acquisitions, then the company needs to find some good ones soon.

Novell and Red Hat will be the only two remaining public companies focused primarily on open source now that Oracle has the green light to acquire Sun Microsystems. I'm rooting for both of them, but it seems clear that Red Hat has pursued shrewder types of diversification than Novell has, and any good investor will tell you that diversification is a proven way to mitigate risk. 

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Both Google's Chrome browser and the iPhone browser rely on WebKit, among many other browsers that do, including the Palm Pre's. WebKit has, in fact, become one of the most influential of all open source platforms because of its ubiquity in browsers, and its flexibility. In addition to WebKit, some reports are coming in saying that RIM intends to include full Flash and Silverlight support in a new browser slated for 2010. These moves could make a big difference for the company in the mobile browser competition.

As we wrote about here, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has cited open source, and WebKit in particular, as possibly becoming part of its own browsing strategy, and that could include mobile browsing. Ballmer said late last year:

"There will still be a lot of proprietary innovation in the browser itself so we may need to have a rendering service. Open source is interesting. Apple has embraced Webkit and we may look at that, but we will continue to build extensions for IE 8."

Microsoft would probably be well-served by moving to an open source strategy for its browsers, including on mobile platforms. Mozilla continues to gain ground with its mobile browser, Fennec, and has just released a third beta of it. Fennec is likely to inherit many of the extensions that have been created for Firefox, which could give it many advantages.

Just last week, we covered this post on GigaOm, which suggests that Android may kill Microsoft's Windows Mobile, and includes acknowledgement from Microsoft officials that they have made mobile missteps. RIM will undoubtedly benefit from having an open source browser to offer up, and with all the trouble that Windows Mobile is in, Ballmer and Microsoft should be looking closely at open source solutions as well.
 

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Everyone's favorite multi-platform instant messaging client, Pidgin, got a major update last week that includes support for voice and video. Pidgin 2.6.1 also includes more than 200 bugfixes and patches, plus a few additional new features that may not be as sexy as voice and video but are still great to have.

Other cool new features include:

* Theming support for buddy list, sounds, and status icons

New Yahoo protocol plugins

A new service discovery browser plugin

Custom smiley support and updated buddy icon support

Optional support for GNU libidn

New authentication mechanism for AIM

TinyURL plugin and bug fixes for Finch

Some, but not all, Linux distributions are offering Pidgin's new update. Team developer John Bailey says, "I'm hoping most distributions will be able to catch up with this soon and make it completely effortless for users, but this is a headache even for some distributions. The biggest setback thus far is we're currently not able to support these features on Windows--but we're working on it! Please be patient!" Fortunately, you can go grab it right from the project's Web site and start using it right away.

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HardInfo takes everything it can find about your system and presents it in an organized fashion. There’s no need to dig through the output of lspci or run a few commands to find out some network statistics; it’s all right there in front of you.

One key feature that makes HardInfo valuable is its ability to quickly generate a system report. This can be very useful to bug triagers, developers, or your laptop’s eBay listing.

Finally, HardInfo is a great tool to use to rank your system against other machines with various benchmarks, which can tell you if your machine is running at full speed or if something is going terribly wrong. These are also included in the generated reports.

Overall: great tool, easy to use, useful for everyone. Give it a try.

from FOSSwire

Jonathan Thomas wasn’t satisfied with the existing video editing solutions on Linux, however. They weren’t easy enough to use, powerful or stable enough. Enter OpenShot, Jonathan’s solution.

Let me say right up front — the project is in a relatively early stage of development. There are plenty of things not yet completed or that don’t work quite right just yet. But I’ve had a brief play with OpenShot, and I am really quite impressed.

The interface will look familiar if you’ve used any other timeline-based video editing package before. You have a project bin on the left, a preview monitor on the right and the timeline at the bottom, where you arrange the clips in sequence to make your movie.

You can’t capture clips directly from a video camera at the moment, but if you are able to get video captured via another source, you then just import the video into OpenShot. I had some old PAL DV footage lying around. I just went to File > Import Files and selected the files.

Right away the clips just appeared in the Project Files area. It just, sort of, worked — I didn’t have to wait any time for the clips to be processed or for any conversion to take place. Now I did only import three clips of fairly short length, but it really was an easy, slick process.

You can then drag the clips to the timeline and arrange them. You can use the Razor tool to slice the in and out points of a clip or split a clip into two and rearrange it. It all really works in a very friendly, familiar way if you’ve ever done anything like this anywhere else.

The only thing that did throw me off with the timeline is the fact that the clips don’t seem to ‘snap’ to the edges of other clips, for example, so at times it feels quite difficult to line clips up one after another without having black space in the video between them. Having a satisfying ‘snap’ feel to the timeline where appropriate would really enhance it.

When you’re done, you can export the finished sequence into an array of formats.

Again, I’m going to admit to being lazy. I just accepted the default settings and exported — and it just worked, again. It is somewhat of a complicated dialogue box if you’re not into video codecs and standards and all of that, but you don’t necessarily need to spend time fiddling with it — the default settings will produce something useful (provided you can play back the codecs in your favourite media player).

There are issues with this project. I found the interface a bit — blue — and not really to my tastes. Also, the icons feel a little bit indistinct and unclear. It’s quite difficult to see quickly what each icon does and I did find myself taking a few minutes to get to grips with which button was which because of that.

Some keyboard shortcuts I’d expect to work, such as the Delete key to delete a highlighted clip in the timeline, spacebar to toggle pause/play in both the timeline and the clip preview in Project Files, to not yet be functional.

I want to stress again that this is an early in-development project. Despite that, it’s the most user friendly, simple video editing program I’ve used on the Linux platform. It just seems to have the attitude of a program that follows conventions, is really simple and just plain makes sense.

There are a lot of features more demanding users may expect before it can be accepted perhaps by a more seasoned video editing audience, but OpenShot shows promise and real potential to be the best home-orientated video editing solution on Linux.

You can download some pre-built packages for Ubuntu as well as source code from the OpenShot Downloads page. If you’re into video editing with Linux, give this a try.

from FOSSwire