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Caldera Prices Its IPO
A reader writes, "Caldera has priced its IPO. See here in Wideopen for what little there is to read about it. " Summary: $7-9 expected range of price, while selling 5 million shares. Update: 02/26 01:31 by R : Slightly deeper story at News.com.
Is doing the IPO biz. Caldera makes a great Business distro of linux (OpenLinux) that is easy and simple to install, and it lets you play tetris during the install process.
My dad is actually running.
BTW, 1st post
So that means it'll open to the public at what... $30? I'd really like to purchase some of this, but I don't really see it happening (not by fault of them, but by my own. Same reason I don't own any RedHat or VA).
Well, Just realized that my first sentence was the only relevant thought I had on the matter, so, I'll just take this time to congratulate them, and wish them a very well IPO.
This is noting compared to linux-pets.com's expected price.
For a more in-depth look at the IPO, click here for IPO.com's filing.
What's your damage, Heather?
I don't know you guys, but when I look the icon created for Caldera, it reminds me much more of Disney than Caldera...
Look, the blue part catches my attention immediately, and it looks so much like Mickey's ear. =)
(This must be the result of working saturday mornings... my brain does not work properly in this period.)
--
Marcelo Vanzin
Marcelo Vanzin
M o d e r a t o r s , I l o v e you . Ple a s e m o d e r a t e m e d o w n . A n d t ell m e: W h e r e' s th e h i g h s co r e li s t f o r neg a t i v e ka rm a?
Have you checked the stock prices on Linux stocks lately? Sure, a lot of people who got in quick made a great buck, but anybody who bought after the first month is really getting clobbered.
RedHat - opened at $7, rocketed to $151, now $68.
VA Linux - opened at $30, rocketed to $320, now at $113.
Cobalt - opened at $22, rocketed to $172, now $104.
This sends a message to Wall Street - get in fast on Linux IPO's, and then dump them on the unwitting public. It also sends a subliminal message about Linux as a whole - that it's not a long-term option, only a short-term one. (I'm not saying I agree, but that's the subliminal message.)
What's your damage, Heather?
.
The market responded appropriately... most IPO's
are hype and eventually the market finds an
appropriate level. VA popped at a ridiculously
overvalued level and quickly came down to earth.
They are going to go down in flames with Lineo.
Caldera is too closely associated with the
intellectual property folks to be taken seriously.
No, they're not as bad as Linux One, but they are
still a generally suspicious group of people.
However, they do a great job of integrating with
Novell networks.
Nope. Brento's prices are adjusted for the split that happened in early January. Those $45 were before the split and would be $22.5 split adjusted. Thus, even at today's pricing, that's still the triple!
> In the end it boils down to dividends...But if those companies keep year after year of steady losses and no dividends there's no way their prices will ever go up again.
Actually, not quite true either. There is one (in)famous company which never paid any dividends, but nevertheless gained value year after year. Yes, it is indeed that company that we all love to hate...
Cobalt is a great daytrading stock. I bought some end of January for 75 1/16, left for a skying holiday, and back home, I sold them for 120 1/8 ;-). Right now, it occasionnally drops back to 100 only to come back to 120 the day after. Great ride!
I unfortunately bought their dumb box. The support was no help at all, they just referred me to hyperlinks I had already read and that did not help. You have to buy their stupid books to figure anything out if the install program doesn't do everything right (the manual they send is as worthless as the manual that comes with M$ windows). Big waste of money, but I was a newbie who bought the press about how easy it installs, and I wanted to get up and running fast. Oh well, now I know better and I learned a lot about Linux trying to figure their crap out.
Marjo Wycam, Master of the Programming Arts
This is why you see things like all of Amazon's stock changing hands four times in its first week. The VC's get in at prices you wouldn't believe and get out before you can even place a trade.
I guess it's okay to assume someone speaks your language when you make the decision to shoot them.
Look at that logo. If you see the 'C' as background rather than foreground, then the inside of the 'C' looks like Mickey Mouse's right ear, with the rest of his face disappearing over the horizion. Seriously! That logo says one thing to me, and one thing only: Disney World Domination.
Does anyone else see a partial Micky Mouse painted on a globe whenever they see that logo?
Given Disney's litigiousness, I predict a future lawsuit. :)
--
is what it looked like to me, yes it does.
In related matters, it may be a not so good time for IPO's, the market in general appears to have peaked around last Dec., and economists are talking about 'soft landings' again - don't think I've heard that for several years. And I can't beleive Greenspan said he sees "no sign of inflation" with a straight face - he obviously doesn't pump his own gas into the limo! When they worry about price rises and jack up interest rates bonds perform better than stocks.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Due to Caldera's distant relationship with Novell, I thought it would be worthwhile to point out that they are rele asing NDS and GroupWise for Linux. I think something like this could hype up the value of Caldera and RedHat stocks, and might offer these companies some way to actually make money.
Its a Disney logo in disguise! check here AHHHHH!
-- dieman - Scott Dier
The police claim to have said something, but nobody still alive remembers hearing it, except for the four guys who were trying to talk their way out of prison.
The "shouted" part is your own interpolation, trying to make your story sound better even as you were writing it. Typical logic: "My version of events must be true; if it were not, I'd be a jackass, and that's unacceptable. Therefore, anything which tends to support my version must be true, so if I make stuff up, I'm really just 'remembering' facts that I haven't heard yet". Or something like that.
It's a shame you feel you have to resort to this bullshit, because the reason they started shooting was actually close enough to common sense that it convinced a jury: Diallo started pulling out his wallet (a mistake, but not bizarre or stupid: Most of us keep ID in our wallets). One of the cops slipped and fell, quite accidentally and nothing to do with Diallo. Meanwhile, one of the cops mistook Diallo's wallet for a gun (in classroom demonstrations of human perceptions under stress, people have mistaken bananas for guns) and yelled "gun". At the same time, of course, another of the cops was falling, and the rest put 0.9 and 0.7 together and got 2. The cops' story, and it is a plausible one, was that it was a coincidence and bad judgement in a tense situation, and they fucked up. Myself, I happen to think their perception of potential danger may have been considerably greater than it needed to have been, due to the fact that Diallo was black. I could be wrong about that, but I've known a couple of NYPD officers, one of them (a close relative) quite well, and it's not far-fetched. Racist attitudes are not universal among NYPD officers by any means, but they are not rare.
Finally, there is no law on the books anywhere in the United States which provides for a summary death penalty for moving when a cop says "freeze". Okay? That, in and of itself, was not sufficient cause to shoot the guy. The only case in which a cop is legally justified in using deadly force is if s/he has reason to believe that his or her life, or that of a bystander, is in immediate danger. They shot Diallo because they thought he was shooting at them: He had something dark in his hand, and one of the officers fell. There was no gunshot, obviously, but when they saw him go for his back pocket (the wallet, remember) they probably went into adrenaline overdrive: perceptions and thought processes are altered in that state.
Don't try to smear bullshit all over this: They fucked up royally and killed an innocent man. Their defense attorneys said that, and they said it themselves. It's the truth. They were acquitted because the law allows for the fact that the police are sometimes required to make snap decisions involving deadly force under great pressure, and sometimes they fuck up. When that happens, we drag them into court, make a big fuss about it, and we hope that the jury makes the right call: Was it a mistake that any reasonable person could easily have made in the same circumstances? Was it a stupid mistake? Or was it just plain murder? The jury here seems to have thought it was a mistake they might have made themselves. I'm not certain that they were right about that, but I tend to lean in that direction.
You guys are loons, but it is still funny.
Caldera is the only Linux I have had crash on me.
EC
EverCode
wow, know what i could go for? a big caldera of hot grits, poured down my pants. thank you.
This is likely the end of Caldera as a viable Linux vendor. The moment any company issues an IPO, they cease to be an economically signifigant business. The main impetus of their activity becomes financial activity - playing the stock market - and ceases to be competitively providing goods and services to the market. And the people who founded the company, with the original intent of earning profit by selling a quality Linux distribution, will no longer be the actual owners of the company. Their policy will now be determined by a corporate bureaucracy at the behest of stockholders, whose main purpose in investing is to gain a short term profit without regard for the actual business operations of the company. The stock market is anti-Capitalistic, anti-Individualistic, and detrimental to the economy. Caldera has, in issuing its IPO, handed the company over to the practical equivalent of Las Vegas gamblers.
Always liked this 'rags-to-riches' story:
A golf caddy asked a patron how he'd earned his fortune. The Billionaire replied, "Son, it was the depths of the depression in the 30's. I was down to my last nickle. One morning I bought an apple with that nickle and polished it all day. At the end of the day I sold it for 6 cents. The next day I did the same, an after a week could afford 2 apples. This went on for several months, at the end of which I'd earned a grand sum of $4.38. Then my wife's father died and left us 3 million dollars".
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Btw, ever trying reading the "GPL" work from Caldera called nkfs. It is so badly documented, it doesn't even state the intended major and minor numbers of the required character device to use it. If your going to claim to release code under the GPL then at least leave the comments in instead of obfuscating the code!
This isn't to say that it isn't of high quality, but simply that Caldera has been outmarketed and outpromoted by Red Hat.
I just don't see how Caldera can make a go of it unless they drop their witless marketing department and really start working on getting Caldera into more places that matter.
Caldera's only hope at avoiding complete irrelevancy is to bulk up with some quick cash and either start marketing their product for real, or make aquisitions that give it a reason to exist.
In America people speak English. If you don't know any English you damn well better learn it quickly. Besides, when a cop shouts ANYTHING to you forcefully the last thing anybody but a criminal would do is run. What you SHOULD do is FREEZE. I would've expected them to shoot me as well if I tried to run away and I'm white! Only people with something to hide would run away from a cop.
Unfortunately, you are racist.
Can somebody explain to me why they start so low when they'll obviously be over 50$ the first day? It doesn't make sense.
Is Lineo included in this? If so, it might be a good investment.
It only split once, so that's 22 bucks. The only pure linux play is Red Hat. VA is box maker and service provider wannabe and is wasting their capital on overpaying for aquisitions. Cobalt is also a box player that just uses linux.
Go long on Red Hat !!!
I really don't know if any of the Linux companies are worth their massive stock valuations. Companies like amazon.com also aren't worth it, but have to potential to be. Linux however, probably doesn't have the potential to make anyone any money. How does a Linux company make money? By selling support, right? Yet, how many companies actually use the support from their OS provider? Most have support contracts for their hardware, but software issues are usually handled by internal IT staff. Companies like SUN and SGI can make money by giving their OS away because they have hardware to sell. Caldera on the other hand, only make money from the distro and from any support it sells. That means a company that previously bought 100 copies of NT from MS, can now just buy 1 copy of Linux from cheapbytes.com. Its not like they used MS support anyway, they just had their IT guy fix it. Thus the market for a corperate linux distro shrinks from everyone who uses the OS, to those who use the OS, but can't install it themselves and can't afford IT staff. Thats a very small piece of the market. Another way for the company to make money would be to write propriatory extensions for Linux. Caldera actually tried this before with Caldera Linux 1.3. Of course it failed. In the wide open world of Linux, proriatory Linux extensions won't fly. This can easily be seen in Redhat. You'd think that a company that entirely owns the corperate linux market would be making money? Redhat is losing something like $35 million a year. As for VA Linux, what the hell are they thinking? Why would I buy from some upstart Linux company when I can get systems from Dell, a proven, reliable company that actually has good service and support! Believe it or not, corperate types don't buy into the labor of love that is Linux. They are business, and they will do whatever makes sense, not what makes them feel good by helping out some upstart linux company.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Lineo is a totally seperate company, and if/when it has an IPO it will be a totally seperate deal.
The specific text from the filing is on page 69 and 70 of the document, on my printed copy it was pages 74 and 75 of 393...
They say half of the 10% Directed Share Program goes to company employees and insiders and the other half to the Linux community via a program at Wit Capital. Apart from needing to fund a $2,000 account at Wit Capital, there is no more information about the program. I have an email in to ask of this at Wit.
Anyone have more details?
Here goes:
Directed Share Program. At our request, the underwriters have reserved for sale, at the initial public offering price, up to ten percent of the shares of common stock offered in this offering under a directed share program. We currently expect that approximately half of these shares will be offered to directors, officers, employees, business associates, and related persons of Caldera Systems pursuant to a directed share program being administered by FleetBoston Robertson Stephens Inc., and that approximately half of these shares, pursuant to a directed share program being administered by Wit Capital Corporation, will be offered to open source software developers and other persons that we believe have contributed to the success of the open source software community and to the growth of Caldera Systems. We cannot assure you that any of the reserved shares will be so purchased. The number of shares of common stock available for sale to the general public in this offering will be reduced by the number of reserved shares sold. Any reserved shares not purchased will be offered to the general public on the same basis as the other shares offered in this offering.
Purchases of the reserved shares pursuant to the directed share program administered by Wit Capital are to be made through an account at Wit Capital in accordance with Wit Capital's procedures for opening an account and transacting in securities. In addition, Wit Capital is an underwriter of additional shares in the offering. A prospectus in electronic format is being made available on an Internet web site maintained by Wit Capital. In addition, all dealers purchasing common shares from Wit Capital in this offering have agreed to make a prospectus in electronic format available on a web site maintained by each of them. Other than the prospectus in electronic format, the information on the web site and any information contained on any other web site maintained by Wit Capital or any dealer purchasing common shares from it is not part of this prospectus or the registration statement of which this prospectus forms a part, has not been approved or endorsed by us or any underwriter in its capacity as underwriter and should not be relied on by prospective investors. The National Association of Securities Dealers, Inc. approved the membership of Wit Capital on September 4, 1997. Since that time, Wit Capital has acted as a co-lead managing underwriter on one offering, a co-managing underwriter on 61 offerings and a dealer on 107 offerings.
That interpretation must be highly cultural. To me it looks more like a heart or the African continent ;)
Going on means going far, going far means returning. Tao te Ching
Remaining Nazi crap flushed.
You know, mentalities such as the one displayed above are why we need a real New Black Panther Party. Not the pointless exercise in empty ranting and anti-semitism currently headed by that loser Khalid Muhammad in New York. A REAL one, which will be willing to defend Afrikan people in the 'hood against ALL of the street gangs, including the one in Blue. Face it, people, we are as a race being destroyed by the sort of animals who believe exactly as the bigoted trash who posted above does: that we Afrikans are sub-human, etc. If we are ever to be free, then we must be prepared to organize and fight for that freedom. Yes, we may die, but the facts are that the white supremacists will one day soon try to kill us all anyway--if events like Diallo's murder can happen in a time when the economy is going strong and most people are supposidly content, what will happen when things go bad and scapegoats need to be found? All it will take is one bad depression with the attendant spike in crime and in the name of Law and Order we'll be getting herded into the ovens. Think it can't happen here? Read what that Nazi above wrote again, read some of the remarks Guliani, Pat Buchanan and other like them have made; go look at what some of the laws the so-called "War On Drugs (tm)" have wrought in this country in the realm of personal freedom and then tell me again that, given the proper conditions, what happened in Germany 50-60 years ago couldn't happen here. Yes, we may die--but the time will come when we MUST be willing to fight and die, to take as many of the enemy with us as we can before going to join our ancestors. We CAN do it, you know. The blood of Shaka, of Tewodros, of Menelik II--victor of Adwa against the European colonialist armies--runs in our veins. We CAN do it. We CAN win. We need only unite, and recognize the power which lies in our hands.
From london Financial Times Thursday Feb 24,article on Egg, a UK internet bank which is loosing money fast by enticing depositors with rates it cannot support (cant a city full of bond traders tell this is screwed?) says :
"In the short term no doubt, the Pru [Prudential, Egg's owners, a British insurer] will ensure Egg's stock flies. An engineered stock squeeze would certainly help, and predictably, Prudential is planning to list just 15 - 25% of the capital"
After the US saw its whole people belittled (and a world economy brought to its knees) by such machinations, simple manipulations such as those employed by Fisk were outlawed. Previous to Fisks demise, Vanderbuilt had been hailed as building a great empire upon such tricks. People will be in awe at such money - this is the nature of money. It has power over people who work for it. However it seems that we are no longer awake in vigilance against even the most puerile of deceptions.
http://search.ft.com/search/multi/globalarchive.js p?query=lex+Prudential&docId=00022400112 2&searchCat=1&offset=6&query=a href="http://search.ft.com/search/multi/globalarch
It's true that the highest price ever paid was $302.625 on December 8, 1999. This was before the split.
There are two ways to think about splits. The first way is to say "the peak was $302.625 (before a 2:1 split)". This gets awkward because of all the conversions.
The second way is to adjust for the split by converting all the historical numbers to their values in terms of today's shares. So I would say: "the peak was $151.3125". That makes it easy to compare the peak price to recent prices.
People on Wall Street and the financial press report this way almost all the time. If you go to finance.yahoo.com and look at a graph of RHAT prices for the past six months, there won't be a giant gap on the day of the split. Instead, every number from before the day of the split has been adjusted, and there is a little marker on split day.
Using this split adjustment, RHAT's offering price was $7 (not $14); the first public trade was $21 (not $42); and so on.
Let's go over your hypothetical situation. Suppose John Q. Linuxlover bought 1000 shares RHAT on the first day of trading. He paid $42 per share. Suppose he bailed out yesterday at $68 per share. It looks like he made about 60%. Not bad.
But wait! He didn't sell 1000 shares yesterday -- he had 2000 shares to sell, because RHAT split 2:1 on January 10! So he actually received $136,000 for his $42,000 investment, or about 230%.
The "split-adjusted" way to look at it is: after the split, John Q. Linuxlover owns 2000 shares of RHAT, which he paid only $21 per share for (same $42,000 basis, notice). Then it's easy to see that everyone who bought at $21 and sold at $68 made about 230%.
You can always recover the raw historical numbers if you need them. But usually it's better to use these split-adjusted numbers because they enable you to make correct comparisons a lot more easily. And that's what the original poster was doing.
And second, when four guys are pointing guns at me and yelling something I don't understand, I'm going to freeze! I don't care if they're speaking Farsi, Tagalog, or Old Low Dutch!
Not that this excuses the cops in any way. Just what I would do in a similar situation.
I wonder what CALD's participation amount will be? I expect they will get 1000 to 2000 participants, and they are reserving $4,000,000 worth of stock. That works out to $2000 to $4000 per participant (ballpark). For comparison, RHAT's participation amount was $5600 and LNUX was $4200.
I think I'll send another check in to Wit today. If it doesn't work out at least they are paying me interest on the account.
Open your Wit account today, guys! And learn where your nearest Fedex office is, and how to do a wire transfer into the Wit account!
Well, I'm wondering if they are going to do like RH and VA did with their respective IPOs. I got the RH letter and ignored it (doh) but cashed in on VA (woo hoo)... and then this mail came in from someone at Caldera Systems.
It was addressed to a bunch of people. One of them was me, one I recognize from the kernel sources, and the rest are nobody in particular. She asked for city, state, zip code, and phone number since they were "updating their files and records"... strange, since I've never purchased anything from them.
So, I figure they may be building up to something very interesting. It's been 2 weeks since that mail, so I'm not as sure anymore. Anyone know for sure?
You know, if you want to be all gung-ho Afrikan, I'd be willing to buy you a one-way cruise in a cargo hold BACK to Africa. Get the fuck out of my country if you don't like it! We'll send you back to Africa with the other spear chuckers and you can be happy all day infecting each other with AIDS and dancing to your jungle drums. I REALLY wish there would've been more of an effort to send more of you back to Liberia when we had the chance.
wow, dont let your digressions circumscribe you...
This Unix stuff is like, really neat n stuff!
I went the Caldera route.
.xinitrc is broken, a newbie can only log in as root. Don't like it? Go pound sand. Kppp dialer totally broken, but you can't recompile, remember, no libcrypt.
It has no libcrypt files, you can't recompile anything.
Tweak Apache to work with PHP? Nope. The stock
Newbies expect key bindings to work like they do in Winders. The bindings are broken worse than RH, and no way to fix.
Their tech support is just abysmally bad. It just couldn't get worse. I tell newbies to buy SUSE.
It ain't marketing killing them, it's the lousy technical quality.
(Remaining verbal farts deleted)
You make me laugh, caveboy. When The Day finally arrives--and you know it will--you will be among the first against the wall.
See you soon.
Hey, nice Troll! But you only get a 7 out of 10 on my Troll-o-meter, however. You shoulda used the N-word for a top score. Better luck next time.
I agree with this and suing the goddamn brits who started it all. I hate getting lumped in with those fucking limies. My ancestors immigrated from Ireland as indentured servants, and a lot of them were treated worse than slaves (their brit masters didn't own them, they weren't property, so why take care of them? "Who cares if they die just before they've worked off what they owe me"). Of course if they had stayed there they'd have the brits aiming machine guns at them to this day. Then my family lived in a northern border state during the 1800s and actually helped slaves escape to canada. But some guy sees me and gives me shit for being whitey.
I'm not going to bother refuting your anecdotal evidence, because anecdotes are useless. According to my knowledge, American African Americans are on average 15, points below the bell curve (85 pts). However, several studies were conducted with African Americans that had a higher percentage of European heritage, and no marked difference was found in the mean IQ of those people. You can draw your own conclusions from that. There have been several studies done with black children who were adopted into white families, however those studies aren't to great because the children were adopted at varying ages and some had other mental and physical problem (probably from a drug-addict mother). A study of black children adopted in to upper-middle class homes soon after birth ( 1 month), free of mental abnormalities, and whose mothers did not abuse harmful substances during pregnancy would be very interesting.
Now that many of the slashdot readers have experienced the magic of IPOs, I'm wondering what their experiences have been with trading companies?
Are the online trading companies worth it?
Fat lot of good your nice military hardware did you in Vietnam, eh, asshole? I'm white, buttfuck, and YOU believe ME--if losers like you decided to start shit most White and Black and all other Americans would be the ones joining together to hunt YOU down, just like the F.B.I. puts the smack down on all your little "militias" whenever they try to launch their stupid "Racial (un)Holy War." Both you and "citizen_bongo" can go back to your compound and wack off to Mein Kampf some more, and leave us normal people alone.
First you have to know the company very well. Then you have to understand the influence on its stock. Then you have to believe that you know better than the market about what the stock price should be. Then you trade.
All the $10 online brokers in the world are approximately the same. Use them to place your trades. But for your own sake, learn how to read the financial statements of a company. Learn how EDGAR works and what the statements are and how to read them.
Analogy time: buying an account from an ISP with 5 megabytes of web space doesn't make your web site hot. What makes your web site hot is the knowledge and work that you put into it. Hitting the "ftp" button (or however you upload your pages to your ISP) is just the last mechanical step. Similarly, hitting the "place order" button on an online broker is just the last mechanical step.
The research you do will determine whether you make money with an online broker or not.
If you don't know where to start, let me put in a plug for The Motley Fool.
I can't believe I'm posting this ... this thread is so fucked up ...
Oh shut the fuck up and go back to AOL.
More info direct from Ransom; On Caldera's Site .
All you neo-nazis can do whenever you want to race-bait is whip out either the Bell Curve or some book written in 1919, for God's sake. What's next, ya gonna start quoting from Thomas Dixon's "The Clansmen?" Yeah, that's some unbiased sources, allright. Most modern biology books won't work for you because they refute everything you say, but then they were all written by race-mixers and Jews so they don't count, right? Grow a brain.
a budget increase for the police? are you slap fucking mad. I think it's a clear case of the blue suits needing to take less action and direct attention to the greater problem of fixing fundamental problems of society. Simplicity is genuis, throwing more money at problems won't help only create more. Haven't we had enough? Anton.
You must be kidding.
"Concerning murder, the law says murder is legal for a police officer to commit."
Show me this law. You cannot. You are stupid.
They have sent out "the letter" to certain people. They apparently have two separate programs; a US one and an international one. Not sure how they chose the people to include, but it does seem to be more limited.
Slashdot probably got tired of posting about every new IPO that comes along. Well, ok; they got tired of posting stories about it more than once.