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

They just...

[NecroPuppy]

...didn't want to call it VA GNU/Linux.

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.

Re:Not Linux anymore?

[J'raxis]

VA.NET, of course.

Great for the stock price!!!

[toupsie]

"VA Software"? Damn I am calling my broker right now. Not! This is a sign that end times are near for "VA Whatever". We have seen it time and time again in the Internet market. The second a company changes its name in this market, they are on the road to oblivion. Confuse the investors so they are not focused on the business plan.

I am really scared that Slashdot will be dumped real soon by "VA Whatever" and my personal data will be thrown into the wind for the company with the most pennies to snatch up. As we have seen in the past, its real tuff to control your own personal data held by a third party under extreme financial trouble.

I am sure that Pud at Fucked Company will be reporting the demise of "VA Whatever" in the near future. Dump the stock if you got it.

Re:Great for the stock price!!!

[ahem]

It never fails to surprise me when someone infers a causal relationship between stock price and company survival.

One way to assess what a stock price represents is that it is the consensus of the investing public regarding what the current value of all future cash flows for the company in question will be.

Stated more simply as two questions: 1. how much do you think this company will net over your lifetime? and 2. how much are you willing to pay today in cash for the rights to receive a fraction of that total future net?

The multiplicative Pozni-like "loaves and fishes" effect of squandered venture capital led to the recent trend of tech companies being in a business other than producing technology, namely the production of securities and the paper they were printed on. Because of this loss of focus on actually making a product and a profit, these securities are no longer worth the paper they're printed on.

In the wake of this effect, you get people asserting that a stock price dropping to zero will make a company fail. In fact, most investors thinking that there will be no future stream of income, and there being a commensurate lack of buyers for the stock representing that income stream, is what causes the stock price to drop to zero.

Re:Great for the stock price!!!

[aka-ed]

Self-serving people make me sick.

You don't buy stock for the purpose of underwriting your favorite failing business. If you were fool enough to do so, your ability to serve others will quickly dwindle, along with the means to maintain your own well-being. Your statement is short-sighted, and whoever modded it up is insane.

Re:Open Source Maketplace Insights

[Anonymous Coward]

I am switching to a Visual Basic kernel and drivers immediately.

Thank you for saving me a lot of time wasted with Linux.

What's next?

[hartsock]

Source Developer's Network?

Dot instead of SlashDot?

Meat instead of Freshmeat?

The Question that Begs Asking

[ackthpt]

Supposing VA Software decides to cut off Slashdot... What's the Slashdot operating budget and can it stand on its own (ad revenues being what they are and whatever other revenue there might be)?

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

Dot instead of SlashDot? no...

[abe ferlman]

Dot instead of SlashDot?

no, it will be backslashDot (c)

The bill gates borg icon will get a stylish makeover and a heroic background to boot.

free passport account with your backslashdot registration!

Yup

[Anonymous Coward]

Saw this one coming.

Open source business is incomparable to closed

[defile]

The open source business model is not:

Lets sell an alternative to Windows, but using open source! This will erode Windows marketshare and open source companies will make billions!

What other possible software market is there besides that, you ask? Look up job offers for programmers. 95% of them have nothing to do with working on a commercial software product. Most programmers develop custom systems. These are seldom sold on store shelves and never exist outside of the environment they're created in.

It just so happens open source software and custom developed systems go hand-in-hand. This is the market the open source business model targets. This market alone is far larger than the commercial software market.

This is exactly what IBM's core business is involved with, and exactly why they're so behind open source.

This blows big-time.

[Lac]

The thing that really gets to me is what this says about free software businesses, and about our understanding of it. Most people agreed, making a business from free software was supposed to go like this:

1. Give the software, sell support: this, as we all know, doesn't work. If the software is that good, no-one needs support. If it isn't, no-one wants it. This is what RedHat does.
2. Give the software, sell the hardware: now this works! Just look at IBM. Okay, okay, they don't actually give DB2 or OS/2 away, but you get the idea. It works! IBM, VA Whatever. VA Whatever, IBM. Profit!

Yet VA Whatever has gone down in flames in a major way while RedHat is mostly going strong. Zope Corporation is doing very well too. So was Cygnus before it was bought out. And etc. ad nauseam. I guess we were flat-out wrong.

Or maybe it was VA Whatever's fault. They had it all: big visibility, a whole shitload of cash, and many of the smartest people in the business. The only snag, I think, was that Direction didn't realize that they actually needed a plan, too.

I think they still don't realize that. Someone should tell them and tell them now. Will you do it, or should I? How about you, Taco? You know the guys. GO TO THEIR OFFICE AND CLUB THEM OVER THE HEAD REPEATEDLY WHILE SCREAMING "YOU FRIGGING MORONS".

Thank you.

makes disturbing sense

[zerOnIne]

this makes sense in a disturbing way considering what they've done with sourceforge... i'm currently working to get an internal SF system running at my company and VA hasn't been too much help (btw, if anyone here has had luck with it please email me or reply here)... what they basically did when they closed SF was to go and completely rewrite a lot of the backend scripts and relicense them as commercial... now they charge insane amounts of money (at least insane in my opinion) for companies to have them come set up a system for them... since their pricing scheme really didn't click well with what we wanted to set up (they charge per log-in account, and we were going to need a few hundred of those, though not nearly as many concurrent users) we're installing it on our own (using the sf-genericinst package, available on sourceforge.net)... the so-called "SourceForge OpenEdition" is still vapor, and when it does get released it will be missing huge chunks of code... namely things like the database tie-ins, and such...

so basically this all makes sense with the name change... VA (s/Linux/Software/) is no longer the open-source-focused company it once was... it's sad to see things go this way...

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)

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?

Interesting lookup on LNUX finds this...

[ackthpt]

I scoot over to Yahoo/Finance to lookup LNUX and find this story, dated today, celebrating Slashdot: Four years, 2,000,000 Visits Per Month Nice article. So is timing everything, or what? ;-)

Notable quote: "Four years and they haven't fired me?" said Rob "Cmdr Taco" Malda, director of operations, Slashdot. "Now that's a record."

Careful you don't jinx yourself, Rob.

Internet Wire is a PR service and the article is from VA Linux Systems. Notably lacking is any mention of VA dropping the 'Linux Systems' part.

Re:Other than OSDN what does VA do?

[duffbeer703]

They are in the business of running through the last of the VC cash, then going out of business.

In related news...

[edashofy]

Microsoft is dropping 'Micro' from their name...

Re:Where can they make a profit now?

[sigwinch]

I always thought the VA linux hardware was a good route for them,...

Except that their hardware was rather expensive. I kept checking their prices, but they were always hundreds of dollars too expensive.

IMHO, their mistake was trying to go from a niche market (nice Linux-running boxen) straight to a megacorporation with a wide range of products (a la IBM). They tried to make that jump by maximizing the burn rate, but burn rate can only buy green employees and hardware. It cannot buy an experienced engineering and development staff, mature software products, and all-important customer relationships and business partnerships. It is possible to build a large diverse company, but you have to expand in stages with attention to profitability every step of the way. E.g., like how Microsoft came from no where and dethroned IBM and DEC. The whole 'Instant IBM' approach was just doomed.

If you look at VA, their strategy was 100% Instant IBM. They tried to dominate the hardware market before they had the mature software and hand-holding support to make the extra cost worthwhile. They bought Slashdot to preach to the converted and shill house products. (Remember the Adfu days when /. banners occassionally had interesting products that actual geeks might buy? The only thing even vaguely interesting these days is Think Geek.) They threw *huge* amounts of money at bandwidth, hosting, and server administration in the hope of increasing the amount of free software. Nevermind that VA would have neither licenses nor expertise in the software thus developed, and could therefore not directly profit from it.

So what are they left with? Banner ads (ha!) for things I don't want to buy (ha! ha!) and SourceForge. SourceForge support and cusom development can probably be made profitable by itself -- it's a useful tool -- but even if it is maximally successful and they get a CEO with a winning strategy, it'll take a decade to recover the capital they pissed away. I don't see them getting such a CEO (although the board could surprise us), so don't see VA even being a software powerhouse.

If I was part of the /. crew, I'd be thinking hard about how to turn what they have into something sustainable. Random ideas: banner ads for tech products I might actually buy, paid placement of a few stories a week, paid Slash hosting (product support sites, religious/political sites, government sites), closed-source turn-key Slash installer, ...

Anyone else notice...

[The Pi-Guy]

...that all anti-VA posts, such as "Will they change their stock symbol" or "Who cares" have all been modded down as redundant?

...that there are very few "Good idea, VA!" posts?

...that the very few "good idea"s that there are are modded up?

...that they're all biased?

...that CmdrTaco is the only one who seems to care and post articles about the OSDN?

...that adding "Now mod me down for being a troll" at the end gets about "+5, Funny" or "+3, Interesting"?

With saying that....

Mod me down for being a troll, just wanted to put these out...

--joshua :)

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?