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Caldera Publically Trading
Fred Palmer noted that Caldera has officially begun trading their stock. The stock is currently trading several points above where they opened: congrats to everyone who got in on this one, but especially to the guys at Caldera. Now lets see what they do with it ... Linsight has a good summary if you're interested.
The best thing that I think that Caldera has done and many people might not know about is that they are responsible for QT becoming open source, thus ending the dreadfull gnome/kde wars. Caldera basically told Troll Tech that they wanted to do a lot of business with them but wanted QT to be opensource, so today we have the QPL and KDE and GNOME can fight on pure technical grounding.
My gripes with Caldera is that they do add too much proprietary stuff onto their OSes, both 3rd party and in house things. I hope they stay true to the Free Software roots of this business.
kfort
I'd like to take this opportunity to thank Caldera for offering a directed share program to selected individuals who participate in open source software. Yes, it appears to have been significantly smaller than previous such programs. But it did seem to be reasonably well run, offered fairly easy and well documented online access to participants in the US through Wit Capital and offered slightly more complicated access to some who are outside the US though other brokers.
Maybe going public is good for the company. Maybe it isn't. etc. But that is what any company that is going public faces. Regardless of if you think Caldera will succeed in their attempt or not or if they are worth their current valuation or not, I think that having them try is great for Linux and, if anything, makes them more accountable for adhering to the terms of the GPL, being a good community player, etc.
I am also glad that their stock didn't shoot through the roof on the first day like VA Linux did; now, even though LNUX is still at triple its offering price, many slam its stock performance as a failure, with little cause. As with all tech stocks, only time will tell what the company is really worth. In the meantime, it will trade at the whim of the market and associated spin doctors.
In case you haven't noticed, not only does Slashot "give back to the community" by simply existing and giving us a popular forum for discussion, but they also have developed some nice code for weblogs, which they kindly give away for free under the GPL, and which many sites use.
-JD
They refer to Caldera Systems as "Caldera" and say it was founded in '94 when "Caldera Systems" ("Linux for eBusiness") is in fact a subsidiary of Caldera and was spinned off on September 02, 1998 along with "Caldera Thin Clients, Inc." (since renamed as Lineo).
I believe it is a bit irresponsible for a "Linux stock site" to keep using the wrong title for the company especially when it was Caldera and not Caldera Systems that agreed to settle the DR-DOS suit with Microsoft for an unspecified sum.
CmdrTaco plugs in his opening the Linsight entry for Caldera Systems as a good summary. Hello? There is next to no useful (and correct) information for potential investors. Could someone kindly answer or correct answers to the following questions:
1) What percentage of the stock is available for public, how many shares are there in total and who owns those?
2) 10% of the public offering (which itself was 5% of total) was targeted to selected Open Source developers and _friends_. What was the breakdown between friends and developers (who have only seem to have gotten a number of shares closer to the low end of the 100-500 share allocation per person)?
3) Which individual owns 73% and controls everything?
4) Who got in before the IPO at $6 per share? (Sun, SCO, Citrix, Novell etc.)
5) Fiscal '99 results: $3mil revenue and $9.4mil loss.
6) Quarter ending Jan. 31.: $553,000 of revenue and a net loss of $5.5 million
7) Product portfolio: OpenLinux distro (and...?)
8) Open Source licensing status of OpenLinux (or other products)?
Every single well-informed CALD investor should be able to answer these questions so let's see if anyone's interested. What comes to Linsight, they would serve those interested in "Linux stocks" much better by also delivering important facts about covered companies instead of only scratching the surface and keeping tabs of companies' PR releases.
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?
If you don't like what /. is doing, vote with your feet. If you are going to stay, quit whining.
If you aren't part of the solution, there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
I have no idea about VA or Caldera, but Redhat was profitable for every year from its inception to Venture Capital Investment Round A.
Furthermore, it has %54 of the market share and unlike Caldera, refuses to write and non-open source code, as well as contributing significants amounts of its funds towards open source development [eg, a quarter of its annual expenses went of GTK development in 1998].
7) Product portfolio: OpenLinux distro (and...?)
AFAIK, they sell OpenLinux 2.3, eServer 2.3 (and that one seems to be very cool, kernel tuned for server performance, hardware RAID compiled into kernel, the whole binary stuff compiled for Pentium Pro or better CPU, Webmin and much more), OpenLinux 2.3 Powerbundle and NetWare for Linux. Also, there is stuff like OpenLinux T-shirt etc. And there is a comprehensive Linux courseware which is non-distro specific, which is Good(tm).
They are also selling some OpenLnux books.
Sigged!
As usual, LNUX is down; closed at 80 today. Check the moving average on LNUX to see the trend. RHAT is down, too. So the CALD offering didn't do anything to pump up the other Linux stocks; it was a lousy day for both of them.
And the Caldera logo does look like Mickey Mouse(tm) overshadowing the world.
Caldera is trading around the upper 20's right now, I'd say they don't have to worry about their stock falling down to earthly levels... looks like they are going to stay in the earthly zone.
:)
This is actually not a bad thing... I'll take constant steady growth over a meteoric rise any day. But hey... I'm a long term investor and I prefer to sleep soundly at night
If Caldera had gone public 6 months ago they would have done much better, the Nasdaq has been sputtering lately and the Linux charm is starting to erode with the wall street pundits. Witness the major hit that Corel (down 20+% TODAY) and Inprise (down 20+% TODAY) are taking. As well as the downward slide of RedHat, VALinux...etc.
Now the real work begins for these companies. Stocks tend to grow based upon a companies growth and earnings etc. RedHat and VALinux will have to prove to their shareholders that their billion+ marketcap is justified. I wish them luck but I feel sorry for anybody who bought them at the top.
Dave Blau
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
Caldera takes the plunge and makes $70M in a day. Way to go. It's amusing with the certain "cookie cutter Linux IPO pattern" that we're seeing develop.
:)
Company X provides Linux services. Company X lost between 2 and 20 million dollars last year. Yet when company X goes public, their stock soars.
Unfortunately for Caldera, they are doomed to follow the pattern of Linux companies before them, by having their stock fall to sane and earthly levels.
I'm sure that the future is bright for our favourite players in the Linux game, it just takes time. But corporate America attitudes sure do make me smile in these cases. I'm looking forward to the time when Linux companies have strong stock prices based on their corporate performance, and not the 5 magic letters that they associate themselves with.
Maybe these Linux companies should strive to see who can turn a profit first, instead of who can gobble up the most market share and start-up's
---------------------------------
"There is no knowledge that is not power"
Seriously.
Ideology is for ideots.
Caldera is placing them selves much different from the Red Hats & VAs. They have a unique offering for embedded support. RH/VA really are positioning themselves as desktop players. I see a lot more room for Caldera supporting embeded for Linux than every corperate IS department switching over to Linux on the desktop. (Not the because of the value of Linux for the desktop, but because of the slowness of most IS dept). Embeded engineers can select an OS with few of the restriction an IS dept has as long as it gets the job done.
S-
OOG SEE MANY IPO!!! THEY ALL SAME!!! INITIAL SUCESS AT HIGH RATE, BUT THEN COOL DOWN AND ENTER VOLATILE STATE OF PRICES!!! ESPECIALLY WITH INFLATED PRICE OF MANY TECH/SOFTWARE STOCKS!!! OOG CONSIDER INVESTING WITHIN FIRST FEW DAYS, BUT THEN SELL ONLY A LITTLE LATER BEFORE PRICES CRASH AND GO CRAZY!!!
OOG THE OPEN SOURCE CAVEMAN!!! OOG BREAK HEAD WITH OPEN SOURCE CD!!!