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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."
T-shirt sales can't pay developer's salaries?!?
</sarcasm>
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.
Has anyone else noticed that *ALL* business models are affected, not just the open source??? The O/S model is really just starting out, consider that when you compare them to hp or compaq or whoever. You'll see that they are holding their own. Which is amazing considering how radical the O/S model is compared to the closed source model (not so much caldera, their kinda like a leech). The WHOLE ECONOMY is in a "downturn" not just this "crazy" market..... geezz... /. has become the MTV of the geek world....
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.
Not a happy day for fans of open source business models
Well, that's because there isn't much of a business model behind open source. It is a fascinating grass-roots movement but the timing for it as a sound business strategy is definitely off right now.
Open source will continue to flourish in the realms of academia and those who are not after material wealth but start up ventures like the above will continue to bleed.
Sorry.
--
$ chown -R us:us yourbase
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
And you are a troll.
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
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.
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.
so they're laying off 38 of 41 staff and closing the doors? someday, open source archaeologists will reopen those doors and find their three skeletons surrounded by mountain dew cans . . .
go get it
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.
Well I certainly hope this doesn't mean that PostgreSQL is in any danger. It's a great piece of code.
Anyone know how many, if any, of the development team were employed by Great Bridge?
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
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.
Who cares? I think where most (people, press, Microsoft) make the mistake in presumption is that BusinessModelFailure == OpenSourceFailure.
Seems like, so far, open-source software efforts are rather impervious to any single companies failure.
So what's the big deal?
. -- Micro-sig
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
I am not sure how "Open" Great Bridge was/is - something is telling me that they weren't Free (aka GPL).
If they were, no one would or should care - because the software could continue on - which is the ONE thing that makes the GPL truely shine: no more worries about losing support on a product (at least if you can continue to roll-it on your own).
Looking at their dev site (www.greatbridge.org) - it seems like they didn't do the GPL thing...
Anybody know more?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Not a happy day for fans of open source business models
What? Caldera buying SCO was the biggest bone head move of all time - they bought the least-likely-to-survive Unix on the planet when faced against Linux. I understand some of the motivation was for their distributors, sales channels and support/tech but really, SCO was a pile of bricks. Bad Move.
On top of it all, Caldera, under the lead of Ransom Love, has got to be the least amiable of the Linux Companies - he has said some *very* stupid things and really dosnt *get* what GNU/Linux will do to the software world... frankly, im glad to see the "Caldera Company" go. On the other hand, i do feel some pain for their employees - best of luck to the *people* involved.
Have you ever browsed through news stories over the past year and heard about dot-bomb.com laying off 50, 100, 200, 500 people and wondered to yourself "how in the world did they employ that many to begin with???" There are many examples of potential successes that were hampered by overspending and poor planning. I have no idea if /. is making any money, but I'll bet that if they hadn't been bought, that the minimal staff could have done quite well. Giving away software and selling service can work fine if you don't staff up before having customers.
I run http://www.freesql.org:27960 to give database newbies a place to play for free, I do it on a shoestring. Obviously if I hired staff I couln't survive.
I hate to say it but perhaps what the tech world needs is a few more MBA's
SuperID
Microsoft spend 6 years so far developing IE, and they bought the initial code from SpyGlass, so you can tack on their development time. That's a lot longer than 3 years.
Well, I always thought that Free software and
business model are incompatible. That does not
mean something is wrong. Simply, free software is
charity.
Software standards are the standards of today's
technology so all industry players must have
equal access to all software. Experience shows
that only an open license guarantees it. Hence
the real business model is for hardware vendors
to sponsor software development whose products
would be open and free, thus leveling the playing
field.
We already have this model and it is a success.
W3C develops a lot of software by itself and it
is an industry sponsored group. Their software is
open. IBM bailing out SUSE may start a trend where
distinguished projects get industry support and
survive on that. KDE league and the Gnome
Foundation seem to be trying this approach too.
I believe that if your goal is to level the
playing field then you will always have to accept
the price that the poorest user can afford
(often zero). It's charity not business but it is
perfectly viable.
Remember the old adage "give away the razor and sell the blades?" It works great for hardware, and it seems to make sense for software.
But common practice in the Open Source world is different. Here, they give away the razor, flame anyone who sells blades, and wonder why no one's paying them for the privilege of being a barber.
Okay, rant off...
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Ok, lessee here, an OS database company that few people have heard of and a company that many of us have heard of but have been taking a very self-destructive path over the past couple of years (if you don't know what I'm talking about, do a search for Caldera in the
How, exactly, does this spell bad times for open source business models?
I'd submit the fact that most of the companies that have been fucked over the past year or so were not actually open source companies.
This has everything to do with bad management and worse decisions. Even before the downturn, only 1 in 10 new companies survived their first year.
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.)
Everyone knows real software companies use coffee cups for promotion.
Xix.
--
"My boss built an RDBMS company and all I got was this lousy t-shirt"
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
So who would be your OS dream team?
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
I think using Linux is an asset for a company in terms of personnel costs. People who love computing, love solving problems, and love working hard are attracted to the open source philosophy by nature. Working with Linux has what economists call a "psychic reward" - people do it partly because it's a reward in and of itself and will therefore do it for somewhat less money than they would otherwise. This is one of the reasons teachers are paid relatively poorly - they do it because they want to. A friend of mine took a small pay cut to work in a Unix environment because "it's more fun and what's five grand when you still make 75K?" (Exact quote, it was one of those memorable statements).
Ximian is charging now too, I believe, as per last weeks announcements. Eazel... well, this is just a hunch, but you might actually need more than a week between when you try to charge at product release and your company going under. Eazel didnt have the capital to follow the idea through.
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
The whole "make money off services" line seems more and more like a lame excuse as time goes by. I'm just about convinced that it is simply the best response someone could come up with when challenged to show how anyone can make money off something they give away.
Imagine something like this....
Gnubert: "Free software is the way to go!"
$uit: "Free? What do you mean by that?"
Gnubert: "I mean free, we give it away and anyone can use it for whatever they want while improving it themselves"
$uit: Mumbles to himself something about Haight Ashbury and LSD. "Uhm.. Well how do you expect anyone to make money doing this? After all, we are running a business here. We'd all like to get paid and ultimately turn a profit, so just how do you suggest we do this?"
Gnubert:"Uhmm.......well....hmmm...um.. I know! We can provide services to our customers that we charge for! We give away the software and then provide support contracts and other services that we can use to make money!"
$uit: "Well if the software is supposed to be so good, why does anyone need support from us? Also, whats to stop other companies from competing with us? Not to mention the fact that providing services costs money, do you really expect us to be able to make enough money from services to offset the loss created by developing the software itself?"
Gnubert: "That's just it, we don't have to pay to develop it. Hackers will work for free because they believe in the Truth of Free Software, amen. Now.. if you'll just invest some money in our new company, FreeRiderProblem.com, we can get busy making new software to give away. We'll make the evil rat bastards at MickeySoft wish they'd stuck to selling basic interpreters! They shall pay!!!!!!!!!"
$uit: "I don't care about that, I just want to make some money here, got it?"
Gnubert: "But you don't understand, MickeySoft is out to steal your soul! At this very instant the company has people working to figure out how to enslave you! They want to own and control everything. Their leader eats the brains of children and bathes in their urine! WE must stop......own us all....monopoly......kill....."
$uit: Quietly slips away as quickly as he can....
........Sound familiar?
Ideologies only work in the minds of those who follow them. In the real world facts and natural laws dictate what goes on. We can seek to discover those laws and use them to our advantage, or we can try to force our ideologies into the picture like someone trying to force the wrong piece into a jigsaw puzzle.
Which are you going to do?
Lee Reynolds
(Go ahead, mod me down because you don't agree with me.)
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
Oh well, the proven methods may work well, provided that:
- The requirements are derived actually by user needs and not by marketing policies oriented to maximize the flow of cash extracted from user pockets
- The software is designed by real engineers and not by buzzword-compliant bootlickers
- The budget of the project fits the actual software requirements and not some half-assed estimate of the management
- No PHB assigns absurd timelines
- The QA department understands that these 'proven methods' are just guidelines and allows development to apply them with a 'grain of salt'
- developers have the so-mentioned 'grain of salt' and understands the need to follow standards
- Testers are not used as scapegoats for missing the deadline, only because they find show-stopping bugs the day before of the release
All in all, software development is still a craft, where the quality of involved people is much more important than the quality of the production process. This is why software developed by loosely assembled (but technically valid) people can compete with software developed by mega-corporations.Ciao
----
FB
I talked to few people who knew whats going on inside Great Bridge - sales were not something impressing, and the money the company had was spended very fast.
Redhat suggested to aquire them, they refused (the CEO was on the board of directors of Red Hat before he left to found Great Bridges - if I'm not mistaken)
So, Redhat wanted to have a database to sell to their customers, PostgreSQL is open source, so Redhat tried to go by the book - Aquiring the company and it's expertise in this field. Great Bridge refused, Redhat took the open source version and sold it as "Red Hat database".
Whats happend? customers know Redhat. They don't know who is Great Bridge LLC. They need a solution and support - and the only name they know is Red Hat (I'm talking about corporate customers) - so they turn to Red Hat which happily signs with them a support contract, and Great Bridges LLC looses another deal.
Hetz (Heunique)
>i>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.
It may be. It isn't now. They are spending money on open source, not making money on it. It may work out for them, but it's way too early to cite IBM as an open source success story. They could just as easily become one of the cautionary tales.
Tim