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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."
You don't make money on stuff you give away for free. Has anyone figured that out yet? You can make money on SERVICES for people who accept a free gift from you. You used to be able to make some money on hardware attached to free software.
What part of $0 doesn't anyone understand?
All open source companies are doing badly.
Suse recently had to be bailed out by IBM and Intel to prevent it from closing it doors.
VA Linux has exited the hardware market and is losing money hand over fist. It appears that VA Linux does not have much time before collapsing.
Corel is selling its _entire linux arm_ for $2 million, which is virtually nothing.
Ebiz, which merged with LinuxMall, has been delisted by the Nasdaq, is trading at $.04/share, has only $1,000 in the bank, and will collapse shortly.
Red Hat, which is by far the most successful of the group, has lost over 97% of its value and is trading at 1/8th its IPO price.
Great Bridge just never really existed. Just as the company was formed the bottom fell out of the tech market. Add to that the virtual commodity status developing in the low-end database maket. In a way it was a company without a soul. Successfull Linux startups seem to grow from a core of true believers. Most of the startups we see flopping out now never really had that. Companies like RedHat, KDE and VA will continue because of these people. Pofits are great, making money is great, but in the end the people behind these companies will continue doing what they are doing because they love what they do.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
should form with the best representative developers from each distro.
Yes, a linux monopoly, while preserving open source philosophy and various linux flavors.
-advantages: fanatically dedicated, growing market for free software
-encourages cross-fertilization of ideas between distros
-unified, centralized tech support
-less duplicated efforts in development and support
-coherent business model can be developed when there are fewer competing models of Linux
-larger company with pooled capital (if there is any) viewed more favorably by market
Stop trying to compete with microsoft! There are constituencies which cannot and will not use Bill's software for their computing needs. These people will continue to use linux and ancillary services and the less overhead involved the better for a company dealing with a finite market.
Goat sex free since 2001
" No serious business model includes the willingness to release incomplete products."
.....
.... Microsoft, Corel, Adobe,
Open Source *CAN* be a buisness model, bit it still is experimental; at least until the right steps are figured out.
I never liked Caldera, and don't really care that they are gone. They were half-hearted about Free Software / Open Source and I could never understand why they stayed around.
Great Bridge on the other hand is probably a real loss. They stood for the Service & Support business model. I shed a tear.
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
This isn't quite accurate. I believe Open Source models can work in a few business scenarios (not in the current give away software and make it up on services one though) interestingly all of them involve making sure your company is not the sole company bearing the weight of development.
On the other hand, the current practice of paying developers to work on a product that you either do not sell or sell for peanuts then hoping to make it up in services, which require additional costs, means that your services will have to be over priced to make up (guess that's why the RedHat DB is $3,000) for the fact that you gave away the software that you spent money developing.
To the best of my knowledge, Caldera's business model isn't really an "Open Source" model in the sense that, e.g., Red Hat's is. Red Hat makes money by giving away software and selling services. Caldera tries to make money by giving away free software (Linux) and selling proprietary stuff along with it.
Remember that Caldera CEO Ransom Love publicly said that he agrees with Craig Mundie's statement that "Open Source is bad for business". That's because even though they give away Linux, at the end of the day they still make their money by selling proprietery software, just like Microsoft.
If you say "I'll probably get modded down for this..." then I will mod you down.
I do not think anything I have written constitutes hypocrisy. You may have some silly and self-serving ideas about how commercial software is made. I can see that these are most likely based on hearsay from the likewise inexperienced geek community.
My experience of commercial software development is that it is done according to certain proven methods, which generally result in stable, working software, that the target market can use.
I do not think it hypocritical to point out that the opposite is true of Open Source projects. You simply cannot do decent software design over a network yet. Teleconferencing is bringing us closer to that possibility, but it will be years before it is ready, and many Open Source developers are dirt poor from giving all their code away for free and investing in companies that used the Open Source "model". Hence they cannot afford broadband.
You can either listen to my experience, and assess the truth of my words from an unbiased perspective, or you can continue following the slashdot herd, because it's the only contact you have with the software world, therefore it's all you know. If you take the time to see thhat what I say is true, you'll thank me for it. If you don't, you'll regret it in a few years, when you do eventually wake up to yourself.
Petty namecalling is no way to make a serious point. Please think harder next time you decide to call someone a hypocrite.
Denial isn't just a river in Italy
All open source companies are doing badly.
Really? I bet that IBM is by far the largest OS company in terms of $$ spent on OS projects ($1,000,000,000, or so they say) and they seem to be doing pretty well. Everyone cries "Who will make a succesful service business that supports open source?" The answer: IBM.
Red Hat, which is by far the most successful of the group, has lost over 97% of its value and is trading at 1/8th its IPO price.
RedHat's IPO price was an insane reflection of the IPO bubble. IIRC, Red Hat claimed to be on the border of profitability just before the IPO. The IPO market (insanely) required them to up their "burn rate" to build for future expected profits. Now that the financial markets have returned to sanity, Red Hat looks to be returning to profitability, at least on a cash basis (the depreciated "good-will" accounting charge will haunt their official accounts for a while longer.)