VA Linux Dropping "Linux" From Name

Several folks noted that VA is changing its name to "VA Software" to reflect the fact that they aren't a Linux company anymore. VA of course owns OSDN which runs various Linux and Open Source web sites including amusingly enough Linux.com. Can't say it matters much to me what they call the thing as long as they let us keep running Slashdot, but it really is sad knowing that most of the cool open source hackers no longer work there. My bad. Anyone have a link to the press release that doesn't require a login?

Comments

VA Research

[Andy Tai]

I believe VA Research was one of the former names of VA. Maybe VA shall adapt it again?
It sounds cool and VA can still sell services.

Worried about open-source funding

[CmdrTroll]

This change bothers me. A lot. VA is Just Another Software Company(tm) now. Not a Linux company and not a company that has a vested interest in promoting open source. Back in the day, VA's success rested on the success of the Open Source movement. Not any longer - as a software company, they are going to be producing commercial wares that compete with open source solutions. Overnight, they have changed from our friend to our enemy.

Many of us saw this coming, but that's beside the point. But personally, I'd rather see VA fold than become a commercial software house. What does VA's new focus mean to us? Well:

• Say goodbye to OSDN. And I don't just mean OSDN, as in, "VA hires a bunch of people to write Linux software." I mean, VA has no reason to support Slashdot, Sourceforge, Themes.org, and other very expensive sites that produce zero revenue. They will probably just sell the sites off to the highest bidder (who will just want the accumulated customer data, and shut the sites down). As we have seen in the past, privacy policies mean squat after a business has been sold.
• Say goodbye to UNIX support. It's expensive to develop for UNIX compared to Windows. VB programmers are a dime a dozen and can be hired for $30k a year, so why would a software company want to hire anyone else? The former "LNUX" will soon be in bed with Microsoft before we know it.
• The removal of the "LNUX" ticker symbol will be another vote of non-confidence in Linux to pointy-haired managers who watch CNBC all day but don't have a clue about technology. Really. The business community will believe "Linux is dead" and it will be an uphill struggle to regain their confidence.
• Augustin et al are willing to sell out their friends and scam anyone in order to make a quick buck. One needs to look no farther than the unscrupulous activities that happened on LNUX opening day to see what a shady company VA is. Our trust has been misplaced.

The future is looking bleak. Our biggest cheerleader has switched sides on us and we are going to be in serious trouble. I certainly hope the Linux community can survive this ordeal.

-CT

Re:Other than OSDN what does VA do?

[Reality Master 101]

I was wondering that too, but according to the press release, "The Sunnyvale, Calif., company said the name VA Software better identifies the company's primary business of developing its SourceForge collaborative software development platform."

So they are apparently hanging their hat on selling SourceForge software. What I find interesting is that apparently the "enterprise edition" of the SourceForge software is closed source and proprietary (correct me if I'm wrong...). Does that mean they have clued in that OSS is not a winning business model?

Re:makes disturbing sense

[dbc]

Ah ha! You've discovered the one real opensource business model that has been proven to work -- the ugly underbelly of opensource software, so to speak. Cygnus was successful because they did exactly this. They charged multiple companies big $$ for the same patch. Hell, they even charged different divisions of the same large company big $$ for the same patch (divisions that didn't talk to each other much, obviously). They *never* did *thing 1* that was not precisely spelled out in the contract. They threw incoming free lance patches on the floor. They hoarded patches as *loooooong* as they possibly could, in order to extract patch fees from as many multiple customers as possible before releasing to the open code tree.

I'm sure this post will be labeled a troll... so be it. It is not intended as such. It is a report of my experience watching an employer write multiple 5 and 6 figure checks for exactly such "services" (in the Will Rogers sense of the word).

I love the OpenSource ideal. I hate seeing Cygnus held up as an example of how to be successful, it sickens me. It saddens me to see SF go the same way, but this has been a long time coming, and is no surprise to me. It started happening about a month after SF went live. VA tried to sell me exactly such *services* when my employer explored bringing SF inside (a few weeks after SF went public). The open code tree at that time sucked. Building a successfull SF behind your own firewall at that time required either putting up with the marginal packages that were released, or signing up for consulting.

Let's hope OpenSource doesn't disintregrate into a band of rich pretenders taking advantage of a community of naive idealists.

(note to self: next time, remember the tags)

Wake up people

[Ogerman]

If you thought all along that the Open Source movement needed:

- big name corporate sponsors

- its very own news relay site

- a big centralized FTP/WEB hosting site

- software companies to pay its developers

..then you were missing the point all along.

Granted, all of these things have been very nice, but the fact is the VA leadership proved themselves incapable of reliably providing us with such services because they lacked entrepreneurial direction. (or they were just dot-com'ers looking to make a quick buck and high-tail.. who knows) Had they focused solely on top quality hardware at reasonable prices, they could have stayed in business for years, even if only marginally profitable until a truly brilliant idea came along. But apparently they weren't satisfied with this. Instead they just threw in the towel and blew out all their VC on worthless crap. Thanks but no thanks.

In light of the inevitable future and to prevent any major disturbances to Open Source developers worldwide, I suggest that we quickly, calmly, and intelligently find replacements for the services that SourceForge provided us before it disappears. Until the US internet infrastructure becomes more robust wrt bandwidth and switches over to IPv6, I suggest something of a large-and-permanent-node-only P2P network to share the load of a SF-style (but more lightweight) web interface for project hosting and management. Such a network would, as most of our major FTP sites, be hosted primarily in academia or by generous ISP's or corporate entities. From a security and reliability standpoint, I think this might not be such a bad idea anyhow. Any comments or takers?