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Great Bridge Out; Caldera in Trouble
tim_maroney writes: "CNET's news.com gives us a pair of open source disaster movies today. Great Bridge, an open source database maker which refused a bid from Red Hat earlier this year, will lay off 38 of 41 employees and close its doors. Caldera, a seller of Linux and UNIX versions, announced layoffs, plummeting revenues, and a reverse stock split intended to allow it to be relisted. Not a happy day for fans of open source business models."
Its too bad they are hurting so badly, they had some cool Unix stuff at Linuxworld.
/linux and operates out of there. The Unix kernel implements the Linux syscalls itself, so under high loads it ends up performing alot better than native Linux, or at least, thats what their graphs showed.
At their floor area, they had one of the lead programmers of their Unix project there to give us a demonstration of their modified Unix kernel.
Basically, they added Linux syscall support to their Unix kernel. Whenever a Linux binary is loaded, it is automatically chrooted to
The thing that is the worst about all of these companies hurting financially is that some genuinely cool tech is lost when they go bust.
Look at Caldera's third quarter results on Businesswire here. They're blaming it on the aquistion of
Tarantella. Also here is the official press release on the third quarter results.
Open Source is not a business model. You can tell, because Open Source includes no realistic methods of making a profit. The goal of business is profit. Open Source cannot profit. Therefore, Open Source is not a business model.
What OS is, is a software development model that has been overhyped and overused. It is not a particularly good software development model, and it owes it's success not to a proven record of stable software, but to one or two well-written pieces of code and a lot of misplaced self-righteousness about "community".
Open Source development has proven time and time again, even in it's most successsful project, that it cannot provide sound design. The design stage of a major piece of software is the most crucial, and should not be neglected. In Open Source, it is not only neglected, it is almost completely ignored, so everyone can get to the coding. Just look at the linux kernel!
Unlike serious software development models, such as the boehm spiral model, open source does not provide a methodology for deisgn, programming, testing and debugging. In fact, testing in the Open Source model is done by releasing your code and waiting for it to break for lots of people. This is another reason why Open Source is not a business model. No serious business model includes the willingness to release incomplete products.
Open Source is a fairy story. Open Source is a naive dream of a few aging nerds. Open Source is a failing software development method. Open Source is not a business model.
Denial isn't just a river in Italy
Jet engine manufacturer Pratt & Whitney learned long ago: sell your engines at a loss. The real money is in service.
At the time, IBM happened to be piloting System R (precursor to DB2) at Pratt & Whitney. And they learned there: Virtually give away the software, and make money on your services. And that's why IBM global services is such a powerful consulting force today. Global Services is the real profit arm of IBM.
But IBM ain't dumb. Of course, IBM global services prefers IBM products, but they'll support Solaris and Linux and VB apps too.
And that's the rub. Most Open Source-centric companies don't have deep pockets, but only support a narrow field of Open Source software.
The fact is guys, it's hard to support 50 new employees on a brand new, growing marketplace. It would be wiser to support existing commercial products while pushing your own [open source] agenda. Heck, that's the successful IBM GS model (sans the Open Source bit).
Grow up guys, get off your high horse and step into the real world. You can't start a company hoping that all your customers will knock on your door supporting your agenda. But you can can fight for your utopian dream by FIRST supporting your customers, and only SECONDLY by showing your customers why your ideals are best for THEM.
IBM and Intel have very large open source interests of their own, and IBM, if they could help it, would move entirely to an open-source model. Intel just works with whoever makes them the most money, and therefore they have agreements with both Microsoft and Linux companies. This is why I don't buy Intel.
VA exited the hardware market, thereby committing suicide. It's become obvious over the past years that the money is to be made selling hardware, not software. If VA was more successful selling hardware, they'd probably be a big name (or be acquired by one) by 2005.
Corel is not selling their Linux arm, they're licensing it. After about 2 years, they have the option to renegotiate the licensing, sell it outright, or keep it for themself (AFAIK).
Ebiz has no real product, and if they do it's nothing special (ThinkGeek is bigger than LinuxMall, and both of them are so insanely small it's not even funny).
The only thing making Red Hat "by far the most successful of the group" is their preloading deals with Dell et al. Mandrake's stock price is actually pretty stable; it's been around 6 euros for the past month. I expect it to stay around for a while longer.
From an interview with Bruce Momjian last year:
The interesting thing here is that they changed the original "two" to "a few" after the third one got hired.
Everything Great Bridge did was BSD licensed, just like PostgreSQL.
Wow, good memory. Yes, we changed from two to a few and decided we needed to keep an eye on this. As it turns out, the three of us never agreed in many cases anyway, showing we were still making company-neutral decisions.
We fully believe in open source and in business built on it (ENTIRELY open source). So far it has worked outnicely.
Our model differs from the one of Great Bridge. We maintain control of the database kernel so that we can sell commercial licences to those numerous companies who need a non-GPL licence. We also have a strong and widely known trademark. MySQL AB offers support done by the core developers. This allows us to offer a total product and service package that is in line with the open source / free software thinking and also makes sound business sense.
Marten Mickos, CEO, MySQL AB