Obama's national infrastructure stimulus may benefit Red Hat, Google, others
Bloomberg reports that a select few technology companies could stand to benefit from President Barack Obama's plans to boost investment in U.S. infrastructure:
[Obama's] initiative, which may rival the 1956 effort to create an interstate highway system, will also involve spending billions of dollars on schools, health care, broadband expansion, the electrical grid and the Internet.
The technology companies identified in the report include open-source companies like Red Hat and Sun, but also IBM, Cisco, Dell, EMC, Juniper, Google, and Microsoft. Normally I'm glad to see open-source companies do well, but I'm a wee bit reluctant to celebrate the government indebting itself to the tune of trillions of dollars so that I and my children can pay it back. It's hard to cheer any investment in open source that takes the national deficit to 8.3 percent of our gross domestic product.
I like open source. I don't like it that much.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
