Lineo near Death

An anonymous reader notd a bit running on LinuxGram about Lineo about ready to croak. It paints a pretty bleak view of the Linux embedded system company. Oddly enough, I'm still not exactly sure what they were trying to do.

Comments

Simple Explanation

[Dead Penis Bird]

It was also reportedly spending $40,000 a month on an office in San Mateo, California to house 10 people

It's simple why this company is going bankrupt. It's poor management like in the example above. There are likely to be many others like it.

It's time business retreats from the glitz and gets back to basics: making money.

Re:Simple Explanation

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you, Mr. Insightful Armchair CEO.

Unfortuantely, there's a bit of a bias in silicon valley. They like to do business with other local firms. And rent is expensive here. But the alternative is not being considered for certain deals. It's not outright stupid decision, except in hindsight.

Re:Simple Explanation

[Dead Penis Bird]

I'm not a CEO, but I am the corporate controller for a small electronics firm, so I realizre the value of proper planning and cost minimization.

Recently, my company moved to much nicer office space, and the rent per employee approximately doubled. But it's still much less than the $4,000 per employee cited above. Even with the inflated rents in that area, that seems excessive, and would not have approved such an expenditure.

Re:Simple Explanation

[PD]

Check out this NPR story on EHobbies. This is an example of what a company must do to become profitable. They need to get rid of their expensive digs and rent a corner of an abandoned warehouse.

Re:Simple Explanation

[Misha]

There are likely to be many others like it.

what? you didn't get the memo? I'd say these guys are like many before them.

Re:Simple Explanation

[cornice]

Poor management? Of course it is but let's look at the pressure to do this.

For example, a close friend of mine was working for a company working on PKI stuff. They had hundreds of millions in funding from a prominent international investment bank. They were told repeatedly that they were not spending fast enough! There were some suggestions that subsequent rounds of funding hinged upon meeting a specific burn rate. Obviously this all changed very quickly and all funding dried up and so did the company.

So who is to blame? Yes management is ultimately responsible and no excuse is going to bring the company back but it should be noted that the decisions that were made were not as irrational as they seemed.

Re:Simple Explanation

[cjsnell]

A solid company with a good product will have no problem making deals happen. Example: Rackspace is located here in San Antonio.

Re:Simple Explanation

[Otter]

I'm not a CEO, but I am the corporate controller for a small electronics firm

I'm wondering which is a worse sign for a business -- paying $40K/month to house 10 employees or having the Penis Bird Guy as your corporate controller. ;-)

Re:Simple Explanation

[ghjm]

Uhhh..wait. I don't think this is all that far above market rates for Class A office space in that area, particularly if they have any facilities for a server room, break room, etc. How much do you think office space in California is supposed to cost?

Re:Simple Explanation

[ImaLamer]

If it's one thing I've learned from Don Lapre... you don't start a business by buying desks, office space and equipment you might need.

We live in the computer age. Videoconferencing, e-mail, cvs, IM, Talk, god dammit! Why spend $40,000 for an office? Tell the bastards to stay at home until you turn a profit.

Re:Simple Explanation

[WhaDaYaKnow]

a) that did not used to be a crazy price for nice office space in the bay area.

b) finding office space AT ALL, has been very challenging for a large period (not anymore). A lot of times it was just a matter of taking whatever you could get your hands on.

b) they did not move the entire company to the bay area,- any large enough company in our industry has to have some form of representation here. So they did the best thing: leave most of the people in more affordable places and get a nice presentable place here as the 'interface'.

So what's your idea of properly handling this situation? You have any better ideas?

Re:Simple Explanation

[Pfhreakaz0id]

so freaking move! that's the lesson I wish our company (now bankrupt) with "marketing and sales" in San Diego. Geez, talk about blowing the money on something that could be anywhere.

Re:Simple Explanation

[amuro98]

Part of planning is trying to accomadate growth.

A $40k office for 10 people may be excessive, but not if they were planning on growing the number of employees.

My last company only had 5 employees, but we had room for about 30. Unfortunatly, we never got a chance to use that space before the company was dissolved. Ah, well.

Re:Simple Explanation

[Craig Davison]

So make some one-time expenditures (you can never have enough CPU power!) but don't stick yourself with a $40k/mo lease. That's just fucking stupid.

Re:Simple Explanation

[MrResistor]

Go tell it on the mountain, Brother!

A company can be only an hour or 2 out of the "premier" tech areas in CA and spend 1/4 of the amount on rent. Why a startup would even think about office space in San Jose or San Diego is totally beyond my comprehension.

Re:Simple Explanation

[cornice]

That's just fsckin' stupid....

Agreed. But remember that the .com boom was more about hype than reality. Also remember that simply having a product to sell made you better than 90% of the ventures out there. With an idea and lots of venture capital, companies would do _anything_ to get tallent. I'm guessing that most people would be attracted by a really great work environment over a abundance of CPU power. Plus this was Lineo. What do they need $40K/mo worth of CPU power for anyway?

Re:Simple Explanation

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to deal with a company about 1.5 hours out SF. Those guys couldn't find a decent MCSE to hire, much less a Informix admin or a Notes developer (which is who they really needed). Oh, but the rent was dirt cheap, I'm sure.

Re:Simple Explanation

[J. Random Software]

As poor management decisions go, letting your investors talk you into burning money for the privilege of selling them a larger share of the company (on extremely favorable terms) to raise money you didn't really need has to be near the top of the list.

Re:Simple Explanation

[Jason Earl]

If you would have paid less in rent, then perhaps the company would have turned a profit and you would have gotten a chance to actually grow. That's why Microsoft is worried about the guys working out of their garage, and not the guys who have hired enough space for 30 folks despite the fact that they only have 5 employees. One of the cardinal rules of business is that it is easier to save money than to make it. Companies that can't get that little fact right are not likely to ever really be a threat.

Re:Simple Explanation

[blang]

When VCs tell a company they're not burning fast enough, they want you to hire more people, and expand the business faster. A really stupid manager thinks that it literally means to burn up more dollar bills.

From the article, I say Harris is the kind of guy that's doing the latter. Letting time run out, and having paychecks bounce, is utterly irresponsible, and grossly immature. If the investors let people like that run a 100-person company, they deserve to lose their money, and Harris deserves to be in hall of shame.

No excuses accepted.

Re:Simple Explanation

[Ed Avis]

If you want to increase your burn rate, the best way would be to buy new offices. Keep buying offices and leaving them empty (maybe hire one or two token people to go in them). If the VC funding later dries up you can sell the real estate and live off the 'fat' for a while. This assumes you don't want to grow as quickly as possible and hire as many people as possible (some companies want to do that, some don't).

Re:Simple Explanation

[amuro98]

Sure, you start in a garage, then when you get more people and can't get find a larger office, then what?

Remember, this was during the "high times" in 1999 and 2000. There was very little (if any) office space available.

Also, how do you expect to attract new employees when you don't even have space to put them? Do you really thing folks are going to be excited to hear "Welcome aboard, you'll be working out of Bob's garage, and remember, it's BYOT - bring your own table."

Finally, moving your company around is a very disruptive process, and something you really don't want to do every 3-6 months... Better to find a place where you can stay for a year or more - even if that means buying something "too large." If done right, you could always sub-let the extra space to another company, until yours was large enough to need it.

True enough, it's a gamble, and in this case, the gamble didn't pay off. Oh well, such is the risk of doing business.

Re:Simple Explanation

[cduffy]

Plus this was Lineo. What do they need $40K/mo worth of CPU power for anyway?

A really big compute cluster, that's what. Having the hardware to recompile a linux distribution for 32 architecture varients, plus a huge number of kernels, plus a bunch of host tools (for several supported host platforms), inside 24 hours time isn't cheap.

Oh, wait... maybe Lineo doesn't have that many architectures and supported kernels. Well, us folks at MontaVista need a big friggin' compute cluster to do our daily builds, anyhow. :)

Yes, odd indeed

[TheGreenLantern]

Oddly enough, I'm still not exactly sure what they were trying to do.

Which pretty much explains why they are going under, doesn't it? If you can't get your point across to those that are interested in what you are doing, you have no hope when it comes to the rest of the world.

Re:Yes, odd indeed

[autopr0n]

Which pretty much explains why they are going under, doesn't it? If you can't get your point across to those that are interested in what you are doing, you have no hope when it comes to the rest of the world.

Well, I always just assumed they were doing custom builds of linux for the embedded market. It's not that much of an intelectual leap. The fact that CT didn't know what they did may very well have stemmed from the fact that he was a moron... (or not intrested at all)

Unfocused

[Slash Veteran]

If your customers can't figure out what you're trying to do, you are in a world of shit.

Hmm

[Sturm]

"Oddly enough, I'm still not exactly sure what they were trying to do."

Maybe they weren't either?

Silver Lining

[guamman]

While the end of the company isn't all that great. Darwin's evolution continues. It seems that this will release quite a few well trained, intelligent people into the job market that have quite a bit of experience. Given that the article also says handhelds were one of their specialities, I'd like to see some linux experts go to work for palm and try to revive it. Not necessarily with a linux OS, but use some aspects of linux to improve the palm OS and make it able to compete with WinCE more readily. Quite a few people agree with me that palm's OS is already superior, but that doesn't make it automatically a winner in the market place.

What they were doing

[fruey]

Oddly enough, I'm still not exactly sure what they were trying to do.

Well, if you read the article right at the end, they made / participated in the Embedded Linux for Sharp PDAs.

Of course, bad management is what causes bankruptcies like this. 70 staff and only Sharp on the books, with royalties coming in a year later?

I bet they were all screwing around with cool Linux kernel stuff and forgetting to sell it to anyone as a practical application. Hehe.

Re:What they were doing

[Rebel Patriot]

One of the reasons they didn't succeed IMO is the GPL. There's a reason very few embedded devices run linux. With embedded devices, the hardware isn't that big a deal to develop and make; the software is. A company doesn't want to invest millions to develop a new PDA OS and have to GPL it. Their competition would quickly copy it and they'd loose profits. Embedded devices are predominately BSD, IMHO. BSD doesn't require you to release the source if you don't want to. Companys don't want to release the code, plain and simple.

Re:What they were doing

[grahammm]

If I write an application to run on a desktop or server system running Linux, I can release it under whatever licence I like (subject to any restictions imposed by any libraries I may link with.) So why should an embedded system be any different? Granted, you would have to release under GPL (and thus offer the source for) the OS and any other GPL'd components (including any modifcations which may have made), but surely you could choose any licence you wish for applications you write in-house (again subject to any restrictions imposed by library linkage.)

Re:What they were doing

[sadr]

Because embedded systems frequently aren't written as independent applications.

Most embedded products (your microwave, cell phone, or even your palm) don't have virtual memory, and frequently do not have any mechanism for dynamically loading applications. Every task is started by the functional equivilant of "main()", and runs until the device shuts down (or power is removed).

Everything is statically linked when the image is burned into ROM, and the code space never changes. Frequently, the tasks all run in the same memory address space, much like a multi-threaded application.

In this kind of system, GPL code is not usable unless the company is willing to GPL ALL of the code. Which just isn't economically feasible for lots of application domains. In particuliar, many products use third-party, licensed software that isn't available in GPL versions. Therefore, these can't be linked into a GPL real-time kernel.

If you go look at eCos (by Cygnus now Cygnus), you'll see a non-GPL license that addresses these issues by a company that is deeply involved in real-time development. The GPL is a complete failure in deeply embedded environments, and RMS and the FSF doesn't care. (Just like they don't care if you abstract GPL code into another application, communicating via a pipe or shared memory.)

How can this be?

[fmaxwell]

Ten to twenty years from now, people are going to be shaking their heads in bewilderment about the attempts to make money selling "free software." They will react in much the same way that we do when people mention "New Coke".

Re:How can this be?

[fmaxwell]

Oh no! A negative comment about the business prospects of Linux! Quick, mod it down before anyone can see it!

Re:How can this be?

[dthable]

And people will also be wondering how news and community sites gave away everything for free. Maybe the /. subscription isn't that bad.

Re:How can this be?

[JordoCrouse]

Somebody mod this back up... He's an idiot, but he would be right, if thats all they were doing.

But you see, they wern't selling free software. They were trying to sell closed source software leveraged off of free software, and (more importantly) the expertise to combine the two.

They failed because of their they way they ran their business, and many, many management missteps along the way.

If Redhat goes under, then you might question the intellegence of selling free software, until then, don't give the Lineo management so much credit. Put the blame where it belongs: not on "free" software, but rather really bad business.

Re:How can this be?

[fmaxwell]

Ignoring the childish insult, you seem to think that Lineo is some kind of odd phenomenon in the Linux marketplace. They are not. Every failed Linux-centric company had 'value added' proprietary software that they sold -- either with or without the OS. Stormix (now bankrupt) did. Mandrake does and they've had to start begging for money to keep them afloat. Sure, Lineo did more than just try to sell Embedix -- they also tried to sell tools for a free OS, but the simple fact is that the Linux marketplace has seen one company after another go belly-up.

And the reason is simple: Linux is viewed as "free software." And by "Linux", I mean the OS, the tools, everything. There is an entire subculture that finds the notion of paying for software offensive (though many of them want to get paid for writing it at their jobs). You'd have better luck getting the average vegetarian to eat a cheeseburger than you would getting the average Linux afficionado to buy expensive development tools.

Re:How can this be?

[JordoCrouse]

Every failed Linux-centric company had 'value added' proprietary software that they sold

As did every failed Windows-centric company, and every failed Oracle-centric company, and every failed Solaris-centric company.... Failure is not exclusive to the Linux world, though, the media may make you feel differently. This is an unfortunate side effect of being a media darling. They love you when you are doing well, and love you even more when you are failing.

And the reason is simple: Linux is viewed as "free software." And by "Linux", I mean the OS, the tools, everything. There is an entire subculture that finds the notion of paying for software offensive (though many of them want to get paid for writing it at their jobs).

But there also another entire group of large corporations that doe not want to pay thousands of dollars for propriatary operating system licences, not to mention costs for customized applications. If I can deliver the same application, minus an expensive licence for the operating system, wouldn't that make some sense?

Nobody ever said that Lineo was selling to the average Linux affcionado. Nobody, and I mean nobody will ever make money doing that. I would rather chew off my left arm than buy something from a company like Lineo, especially when I can write it myself.

Lineo was selling to the big boys, corporations who see the value in paying $20 an unit for an solution, instead of $120.

Re:How can this be?

[Moridineas]

you can talk all you want, but as they say, the proof's in the pudding..Many software vendors have been _HUGELY_ succesful for other platforms. We have yet to see a single linux company be really succesful. Mind you, I'm not saying it won't or can't happen...but it hasn't yet.

Re:How can this be?

[Znork]

In the embedded market look at Axis (www.axis.com) for a successful 'linux' company. Of course, they dont make a big deal of using Linux. They just use it, reap the profits and go on selling *products* rather than hyping a good way to decrease costs.

Re:How can this be?

[rtscts]

As did every failed Windows-centric company, and every failed Oracle-centric company, and every failed Solaris-centric company....

Except the kinds of companies/customers that would buy open source are different from those that buy closed source (or any other restricted license).

Those that make major use of open source have come to the realisation that with closed source, you're eventually going to get fucked over. Therefore, there's no way in hell they're going to buy a product from a dodgy upstart, part based on open source, and part based on closed.

Re:How can this be?

[fmaxwell]

No, but I find your comments offensive. I am part of that subculture.

You've successfully confused me. You apparently aren't adverse to paying for software, so you were not in the group about I was talking about, so why were you offended?

Re:How can this be?

[johnnyb]

Actually, there are many, many businesses that have done well selling free software. However, they don't make the news because they are smaller. That's right, Linux puts power in the hands of the small business. And there is nothing wrong with that, nor anything anti-corporate or anti-capitalistic about that, though some would have you think otherwise. Successful Linux companies include:

Cygnus, before being bought by Red Hat.

Ada Core Technologies

Many, many, many local consultants

Hardware companies (though these tend to not be solely Linux-oriented, you would think that if the Linux options weren't generating profits they would be cut, wouldn't they?)

Re:How can this be?

[johnnyb]

Many software vendors have been _HUGELY_ succesful for other platforms.

***

I don't think we are going to see ANY software companies become HUGELY successful ever again. Why were they that successful? Because they had complete control of their customers. And customers are much smarter these days.

Here's another question - name a software startup (ANY PLATFORM) after 1999 that was hugely successful.

Re:How can this be?

[Cyno]

By that logic Microsoft should be going out of business soon. Why would anyone pay for commercial software if a free alternative exists? People will pay for free software, just not the geeks who work on it all the time. And people will continue to pay for commercial software because it looks easy on TV. Most people don't go out of their way to save money anymore, or at least that's my opinion.

Re:How can this be?

[Cyno]

Okay, so maybe you weren't talking about me. I am part of the FSF/GNU/Linux movement by supporting and recommending business solutions (not a developer). But you're right, I pay for software, so I must not be in the subculture you mentioned. I'd guess that just about everyone older than 20 who uses linux has paid for at least one piece of software in their life. Now I'm confused, too. Can you tell me more about this subculture you were talking about? I would have been offended if someone said that people like me think all software must be free and refuse to ever pay for it, because that simply isn't true. Perhaps there are other Linux advocates that are more extreme?

Best Quote of the Article

[EraseEraseMe]

It's said a lot of embedded engineers regard Linux as "that operating system for pimple-faced computer science nerds dressed in T-shirts they brought at the last 'Star Trek' convention."

This, coupled with "Embedded experts claim the embedded space is practically impossible to play in these days if all you have is an operating system, especially when the OS is basically immaterial to the embedded designer. The fact that Linux is ostensibly free is also reportedly a hurdle to design-wins in view of Lineo's royalty proposition." would seem to indicate what I had thought all along..."Linux is not the be-all and end-all"

Thought they were all gone by now

[moankey]

Didnt know there were still companies around that dont have a clear plan a lots of money to throw around. I thought 2001 was the year that all bad and some good companies went down for the count.

Nothing too surprising or new to read here, just another technology company that was riding the tech boom and investor ignorance.

Bankruptcy.

[saintlupus]

It paints a pretty bleak view of the Linux embedded system company.

If only they'd changed their focus in time. They could have been a survivor, like VA Ice Cream And Adult Novelties.

--saint

Lineo's mission

[PhysicsGenius]

Their stated mission was to be the premier source for Linux-enabled embedded computing in the science and technology sector. We bought a few of their accelerators and let me tell you, they sucked crap off the floor.

First, the particle reconfiguration matrices were hopelessly complicated to calculate using their UI. Second, the phase-alignment eigenvalues they used as defaults were circa 1974. But worst of all was the induction shielding--we had bitflips left and right including one memorable occasion when we lost a whole night's processing.

I'm not sorry OR surprised to see them go under.

Re:Lineo's mission

[ocie]

These babies will be in the stores while he's still grappling with the pickle matrix! Gyvinblayvin!

-- professor Frink

Re:Lineo's mission

[SuiteSisterMary]

AND you got a +1 informative! *golf clap*

Re:Lineo's mission

[AJWM]

ROTFL! I see some poor moderator got sucked into ranking all that bafflegab as "informative".

Funny, maybe. But about as informative as trying to learn physics from Star Trek.

Re:Lineo's mission

[lamont116]

But about as informative as trying to learn physics from Star Trek.

And you thought you were joking.

Re:Lineo's mission

[Eccles]

ROTFL! I see some poor moderator got sucked into ranking all that bafflegab as "informative".

Perhaps Slashdot could hire him to do April Fool's Day articles next year?

This is just flat out *wrong*

[BurritoWarrior]

n fact, a fair number of the last paychecks of the 50 people laid off reportedly didn't clear the bank. Paychecks paid to current employees at the end of March didn't have any funds to cover them either and automatic deposits weren't made.

The people in charge know long before all the money runs out that things are in bad shape. It doesn't sound like they notified any of their employees or gave them any warning so that they could look for other jobs.

Cripes. People have bills to pay and families to feed. Doesn't anyone have a shred of decency anymore?

Re:This is just flat out *wrong*

[terrymr]

I'm betting that the canopy group was dragging their feet on some promised funding - Lineo management probably expected the money to be there when they printed the checks - Note that canopy agreed very quickly to underwrite the paychecks to avoid labor law violation lawsuits. Why would canopy care if they were wanting to shut Lineo down anyway ?????

Re:This is just flat out *wrong*

[Evro]

Yeah, I've had this happen to me, and it's really criminal. Unfortunately, the people who get screwed don't usually have the money to get an attorney so basically they're SOL AFAICT. When they did it to me I was suicidal - I was already in debt and then magically, nobody got paid, and nobody offered any explanation for 2 more weeks. Meanwhile, they shifted all the corporations' assets around so that the one who originally signed our paychecks had no assets, but the stuff we worked on for months is still theirs.

Makes you appreciate disgruntled employees' actions more when it happens to you.

Re:This is just flat out *wrong*

[benwb]

Why would canopy care if they were wanting to shut Lineo down anyway ?????

Because as investors with a significant stake in the company they could share in the liability.

Re:This is just flat out *wrong*

[penguin_nipple]

Cripes. People have bills to pay and families to feed. Doesn't anyone have a shred of decency anymore?

From my experience I can give a resounding 'no' to that. There is no decency unfortunatley. I was a research devloper at a Canadian University in the dept. of physics and computing. Our research group is/was a "Center for Excellence" and we developed two fully functional laser simulators of the Quantum Well and VCSEL variety. Things were progressing for 2 years, and the projects both reached decent beta stage.

Our entire research group was summarily laid of on a lovely friday afternoon at 5:30. No warning, no heads-up, no consideration.

Personally I was insulted but I can tell you, I am not the first, nor the last that this has happened to...

Mind you the educational institution referred to here had no problem highlighting our research group and some of my other research projects in glossy fliers in order to attract attention to new students and the general populace.

Oh the irony of being highlighted in promo material by the marketroids and concurrently bitchslapped by the accounting dept. in one fell swoop.

Re:This is just flat out *wrong*

[Nehemiah S.]

That's what you get for being at work at 5:30 PM on a Friday. If you'd left early to party (like any self-respecting physicist) they'd have had to wait until monday to fire you.

And would probably have waited until the next friday, to "avoid incidents"; if you had left early then too, and every friday since, I bet you'd still have a job.

The moral of this story is obvious ( /me looks at watch- one more hour :)

Re:This is just flat out *wrong*

[penguin_nipple]

hahaha....I'll keep that in mind in the future, but naturally like most people we were given the option to continue working the projects. Unfortunatley there would be no more funding, wonderful pill to swallow when it comes from a guy making in excess of 100K/year.

Also, since I was a lowly RA, no automatic paycheques into said bank account, had to have time sheets signed with work logs as well....

I am fairly sure you are glad you don't have my life :)

Re:This is just flat out *wrong*

[guygee]

You experience agrees quite well with what I have seen and experienced working in the private sector in the U.S., for example, when I worked for General Motors we always got the "pink slip" notification of indefinite layoff on the last day of our employment. I went through several layoff and recall cycles with that company on those terms.

What surprises me is that a University would behave like that. In my current job working for the University of Central Florida, I have never seen any faculty laid off without first receiving a one-year "terminal contract". There is always at least a one year warning - much more civilized than the private sector.

Re:This is just flat out *wrong*

[penguin_nipple]

There is a fairly nasty loophole at my (now former) institution. Research Associates/Assistants are not technically employed by the academic institution, we are hired by the 'supervising' professor. This gives the school a number of bonuses (from their POV) - no benefits for us, labour laws do not apply to us (and this is stated in the Ontario Labour Law guidelines too), no sick leave, no perks of a financial nature.

This is fairly easy for them to get away with as many of RA's do it for love and fun rather than financial gain (read: we are easy to mess with). I think most institutions might class RA's as 'staff' which would entitle them to normal staff treatment. But as it stands, we are essentially a group with no rights and no benefits. It's for that reason I have decided not to purse it as a 'career' (if you could call it that) any longer and am currently consulting and looking for a (preferably) research job in the private sector.

I have no idea what may come of it, and I continue to work on my own research at the school (grid, beowulf, distributed computing) but it's my own research , no pay , only for the love of the work.

Any available positions at the University of Florida? (much nicer climate than waterloo)

=)

*sighhhhhh*

Re:This is just flat out *wrong*

[NDPTAL85]

Wow. Hope thinks work out for you eventually dude.

Re:This is just flat out *wrong*

[Hanno]

Cripes. People have bills to pay and families to feed. Doesn't anyone have a shred of decency anymore?

(This is not an anti-US flame, just an observation...)

Well, the "hire and fire" business paradigm actually enforces this management style...

Many industrial nations have laws against this type of abuse and/or effective unions that are well respected and have a real force in protecting workers against this.

Just look at Europe.

But whenever Americans are pointed to this, they shake their collective heads and denounce this as modern-day communism...

But I have to admit that I certainly prefer living under my "oppressive socialist governemt" (quote from an US reader) than in a work environment where I can get a pink slip out of the blue and be told to leave the building within 15 minutes, guided by security guards.

Things aren't all peachy here, of course. The .com boom and whimper has lead to a union-free zone of media companies that also practiced the "hire and fire" style because they could...

-1 Flamebait

[somethingwicked]

Oddly enough, I'm still not exactly sure what they were trying to do.

Taco still says the same thing about the night he walked in on "those gross naked people"!

Sorry, it was too easy a softball to leave alone...

Any Open Source/Linux/BSD Companies doing well?

[toupsie]

There is a tendency in news coverage to hype the bad and forget the good. That holds true with Slashdot -- with a parent like VA/Whatever-they-are-calling-themselves-today how could you not?

Is there anyone out there in the OpenSource Business World that is doing it right, making a profit and kicking corporate butt? The Mandrake Club sounds like a glimmer of hope. It would be interesting to read of stories where code freedom equals profits.

Re:Any Open Source/Linux/BSD Companies doing well?

[tempest303]

Red Hat, Ximian, and the Kompany all appear to be doing well...

Re:Any Open Source/Linux/BSD Companies doing well?

[Zico]

Is there anyone out there in the OpenSource Business World that is doing it right, making a profit and kicking corporate butt?

No Linux companies are, and Mandrake Club won't survive much longer either. BSD companies can because they have the ability to add value above and beyond the standard product to differentiate themselves while not having to give away their source code to their competitors just lying in wait for a code drop. If you're thinking about starting a company that's going to produce GPL'd software, please just give your money away to a decent charity so that at least some good might come of it before it's all gone.

Re:Any Open Source/Linux/BSD Companies doing well?

[ftobin]

No Linux companies are, and Mandrake Club won't survive much longer either. BSD companies can because they have the ability to add value above and beyond the standard product to differentiate themselves while not having to give away their source code to their competitors just lying in wait for a code drop.

See, the thing is that the Open Source and Free Software developers don't care that much about your company if you take in BSD-licensed code and sell it closed-source, such as Microsoft and Apple have done. This practice does little benefit the the OS and FS communities, and so these communities see little reason in promoting or helping such companies.

With companies like RedHat, however, I feel great about paying them money for their RedHat Network service, and providing code for the OS/FS community RedHat participates in, since I know that I'm helping the community in the long run.

Re:Any Open Source/Linux/BSD Companies doing well?

[xphase]

As far as I know Wasabi seems to be doing fine.

They even work in the embedded systems area.

No, I haven't seen any financial reports, but I've not heard of any trouble either.

--xPhase

Re:Any Open Source/Linux/BSD Companies doing well?

[C. Mattix]

From RedHats SEC 10-Q Filing.

• Gross Profit on Subscription and Services: $40,565,000
  
• Total Operating Expenses: $150,509,000
  
• Net Loss for 9 month period ending November 2001: $-97,965,000
  

That doesn't seem that healthy to me, especially since 1 year ago the net loss was $-62,495,000. And Open Source Services only counted for $13,641,000 of the revenue.

Re:Any Open Source/Linux/BSD Companies doing well?

[adolf]

You'll have to ask yourself the question below from the standpoint of a corporation. This is because you, by yourself, don't matter. There's not enough people in the world that give a fuck about open source software for anyone else to matter, either. And there quite likely will never be. People don't generally think of publicly-traded corporations as charities, and it seems rather unlikely that they ever will.

That said:

Would you, the one who must answer to your shareholders and their families and dinnertables, rather feel good about what you're doing for the GPL community and see how long you can tread water, or bring home a few dollars selling BSD?

Re:Any Open Source/Linux/BSD Companies doing well?

[ftobin]

Would you, the one who must answer to your shareholders and their families and dinnertables, rather feel good about what you're doing for the GPL community and see how long you can tread water, or bring home a few dollars selling BSD?

I'm not trying to say what companies should be doing, but trying to point out that once you start selling proprietary software (e.g., originally BSD-licensed), you will lose community support.

The reason that we have good, free bazaar-model-developed software is because the code is OS/FS. Once it is 'taken out of the loop', as a community we start losing. Personally, I don't see any benefit for the community writing or promoting BSD-licensed software, unless you don't see anything wrong with things turning non-free.

Re:Any Open Source/Linux/BSD Companies doing well?

[NDPTAL85]

Well in order for what you say to be true the Open Source and Free Software communities would have to actually be worth as much as you say thay are. I'm not so sure they are.

Its not like a company can simply post their software code on a website and have it automagically improved and maintained by the two communities. It just doesn't work like that. Even Red Hat has paid kernel hackers and other paid developers. They aren't exactly getting free development from Alan Cox now are they? And since most open source/free software developers only work on what interests them, then it is usually nothing more than a waste of time for a company to release its source under a GPL license and expecting to get anything financially beneficial in return.

One would have thought that by now the overly simplistic assumption that 'Companies who release their software under the GPL will do better and outperform those who don't' would have died by now. Obviously some are still clinging onto the dot.com era as tightly as does a Raccoon near death would to a shiny piece of metal.

Re:Any Open Source/Linux/BSD Companies doing well?

[johnnyb]

However, you have to remember that most of that is "paper-money", not a cash loss.

When you buy a company for stock, the cost of that transaction is based on the value of the stock when you bought it, and it gets depreciated over a few years. When Red Hat bought Cygnus, it's stock was worth around $300/share. So, for the next several quarters, Red Hat had to expense off that transaction, resulting in a paper (not real) loss. Had Red Hat made the purchase when their stock was worth $10/share, over 100 million of those "expenses" would not have been recorded.

Re:Any Open Source/Linux/BSD Companies doing well?

[Groganz]

Problem is you're talking about "paper-money", C. is talking about real money.

Canopy Group == Kiss of death

[1010011010]

As far as I can tell, Canopy invests in companies to piss off Microsoft, and doesn't do much to ensure that the companies it has invested in succeed.

Maybe I'm wrong, but that's how it seems to me.

Capitalize?

[alanwj]

"recapitalized going forward and a new capitalization structure worked out with existing investors."

So how come the whole quote is in lowercase? Or is lowercase their new capitalization structure?

Re:Capitalize?

[sulli]

They are saving capital, silly!

BEOS will be their first choice...

[Ominous Armed Cow]

1) Palm bought all of BE's assets, including the BEOS, which spawned an offshoot that Be was trying to retarget at the embedded market.

2) Palm is moving to the StrongARM platform for high end units (i.e. corporate apps). I have a Zaurus SL5000D (206Mhz, 32MB of Ram, 16MB Rom) which is a good example of what this architecture can do with a more functional operating system like Wince 2002.

3) Beos was an incredibly fast OS which ran in a very small footprint, so my guess is Palm will introduce it as PalmOS 6 or 7. When that happens, I'll go buy the Clie clamshell version of it.

Sharp ships Linux PDA...

[Anonymous Coward]

It uses Lineo's version of Linux

As seen here:
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story &cid=73 &ncid=73&e=2&u=/zd/20020404/tc_zd/5105778

Website has alreay croaked

[Target Drone]

The company might still be around but it looks like their website has just croaked from the slashdot effect.

Life after death effect

[Animats]

The Lineo web site is still up, with no indication that they've tanked. Of course, that may just mean that everybody was laid off and there's nobody to update the web site.

There are a surprising number of dot-coms in that situation. If the web site was outsourced, it can outlive the company by months, until the hosting service gets around to deleting it.

My old BWUNN web site, which was a takeoff on the promotion for the movie "AI", is still up, even though I closed the account with the hosting service long ago, and they stopped billing me. The labor time to flush accounts may be more than the cost of keeping them up until the equipment gets retired.

Are there co-located servers from dead dot-coms still in place and running? Those might survive, forgotten in some hosting facility, for years. See if you can find any.

Re:Life after death effect

[NDPTAL85]

I know this is off topic but I got to take this up with someone. Those AI sites. I loved them. I tried to visit each one completely. But they were lies. The fucking movie was NOTHING like the sites were. It was such a damn let down. I've never been so mad at having seen a bad movie. I wanted to seriously ask for my money back. If the movie had ben 25% of what the websites were it would have been a hit instead of the flop it was.

In other news...

[jargoone]

A revolutionary new program, and it wasn't even written by Microsoft:

$ spell
An anonymous reader notd a bit running on
notd
$

How hard can it possibly be?

Errr... What I meant was...

[Ominous Armed Cow]

a more functional operating system *than* Wince 2002.

Re:Errr... What I meant was...

[Rudeboy777]

Now who's Wince-ing? :)

Lineo=CompuGlobalHyperMegaNet

[ltsmash]

Lineo's best bet for the future would be to change its name to CompuGlobalHyperMegaNet. That would make it even more difficult for people to figure out what they do. (Lineo gives a hint the company does something with Linux, although no one can tell you exactly what.) By making their products/services even more obscure, they could attract more investors.

Linux in embedded devices is not dead

[Kushana]

Intrinsyc is an embedded software company that supports Linux in some cases. Although not dead, they still haven't posted a profit yet.

buyout

[frankmu]

maybe sony or sharp could buy them out. they could then continue work on linux for the ps/2 and zaurus... then again... maybe not.

and in other news...

[Cinnibar CP]

An anonymous reader notd a bit running on LinuxGram about Lineo about ready to croak.

And this slashdot user notd a bit ago that the slashdot effect caused LinuxGram to croak.

Re:You mean like OSDN?

[suffocate]

Death spiral, I believe.

Now that you mention it...

[Otter]

See The Future of Mandrake Linux? The Answers!

And discussion on Linux Today...

Explain This, Please

[cjsnell]

Why the hell would this company dump $40K/month into SFBA offices? They are based in Lindon, UT--one of the prettiest places in the country. There are countless advantages that UT has over CA. Here are a few

Skilled Workforce

• Utah: Plenty of skilled folks available at a great price. Notable schools: utah.edu (early adopter of Internet), byu.edu
  
• SFBA: Maybe a few more workers available these days but still overpriced. Notable schools: standford.edu, berkeley.edu
  

Cost of Living

• Utah: Cheap, cheap, cheap. You can actually rent a real house with a real yard here for less than $3000/month! For $1100/month, I lived here, no shit.
  
• SFBA: I lived in a tiny room in an old lady's house in Livermore for like $650/month.
  

Lifestyle

• Utah: Gorgeous mountains, beautiful deserts, great skiing (snow and water), hiking, Utah is actually quite cosmopolitan, "down home" friendly folk, and YES, there are plenty of places to get drunk. Park City has 5-star restaurants and is the home of the Sundance Film Festival.
  
• SFBA: High crime rate. Smog. Traffic. Rude people. Drive 4+ hours to ski. Nice restaurants, though.
  

Geekiness

• Utah: High speed access available most everywhere, even up in some of the mountain towns.
  
• SFBA: When I left in 98, they still had no DSL. Things have changed since then, I'm sure.
  

Did I miss anything?

Re:Explain This, Please

[cjsnell]

As I cited in a reply farther up the page, Rackspace has few local customers here in Cowtown, USA (aka San Antonio TX) but that hasn't stopped them from prospering.

Re:Explain This, Please

[Ralph Bearpark]

> Did I miss anything?

Ah Utah! The extensive proving ground for biological and chemical warfare agents? The vast chemical weapons stockpile? The massive chemical weapons and hazardous waste incinerators? The huge hazardous and radioactive waste landfills? The bombing ranges? The magnesium plant with the record for most toxic air-polution?

This Is Still The Right Place ... for the National Garbage.

Regards, Ralph.

Re:Explain This, Please

[betis70]

Uh, you think the Golden State Warriors rank as a REAL basketball team?

Re:Explain This, Please

[CrayzyJ]

"Plenty of skilled folks available at a great price."

I've never been to Utah, but typically companies like to set up where there is an abundance of skilled workers and more than 1 school to choose from. Also, many skilled people prefer to live in/near major cities. That's why large companies don't go to Alaksa to set up camp.

"Did I miss anything?"

Cost of travel to see every single client?

Re:Explain This, Please

[the_rev_matt]

I drove through Utah from Colorado to Nevada once. On entering there was a sign with the state motto "The Right State". Someone obviously familiar with UT had inserted Wing between Right and State.

Re:Explain This, Please

[cjsnell]

I've never been to Utah, but typically companies like to set up where there is an abundance of skilled workers and more than 1 school to choose from. Also, many skilled people prefer to live in/near major cities. That's why large companies don't go to Alaksa to set up camp.

Actually, Utah really does have an abundance of tech workers. Novell, American Express, and many others are based there. eBay has one of their major datacenters there. University of Utah and Brigham Young University both have well-reknown CS departments. Utah State in Logon isn't bad, either. It obviously has something of a tech community because both Lineo and Caldera are based there.

SLC is pretty damned "major" if you ask me. It's well over several million in population. It's a Delta hub, so you can pretty much fly to any decent sized city in the US without having to change plains. By Air, it's about 90min, IIRC, from SFO.

Re:Explain This, Please

[grytpype]

>SLC is pretty damned "major" if you ask me.

I would agree with you, but I've actually seen SLC.

Re:Explain This, Please

[Wavicle]

Well, for starters Salt Lake County in Utah is ranked #31 on the American Lung Associations 2001 State of the Air worst counties. San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Cruz had no measured unhealthy ozone levels in that year. Why would they? The on shore breeze blows it all towards the inland valley.

You missed the bay area weather. Seasonally it is very mild.

In your "skilled workforce" section you forgot that Stanford and Berkeley are two of the top 5 engineering schools in the country according to U.S. News & World Report.

A "few" more workers available? You haven't been out here in a while have you? You have no idea how much talent is lying around out there unable to get a job anywhere (the market *really* sucks right now). There are thousands of talented (and tens of thousands of wannabe talented) people desperate for work here. People with Masters Degrees and experience behind them are taking 60K/yr jobs, if they're lucky enough to find them.

And as someone else mentioned, companies in the bay area like to do business with companies in the bay area. Why? They have this obsession with driving and meeting face to face I suppose. I've always been bitter about this fact. I've experienced it first hand a number of times. If they don't think they can get on the phone and arrange a meeting (and they love meetings, maybe that's why the dot coms failed, too many meetings about "what are we going to do?" and not enough doing) they don't want to do business with you.

I love Utah, and if there were jobs there, I'd move there. I like big houses in low density housing communities. But it's not for everyone, and there is no Sand Hill Road. Your Rackspace argument doesn't really hold. It's a hosting company. They're providing a service completely different from what Lineo is trying to do. Heck, Lineo was based in utah but they had a bay area office because they knew if you want bay area companies to buy your product/service, you need to be in the bay area.

Re:Explain This, Please

[jedidiah]

And what would those costs be exactly? Do you even know what's involved in commuting by air within the Pacific timezone?

How would this compare with the need to pay EVERY one of your employees an extra 40% just to PARTIALLY accomodate the increased cost of living?

Re:Explain This, Please

[dublin]

As I cited in a reply farther up the page, Rackspace [rackspace.com] has few local customers here in Cowtown, USA (aka San Antonio TX) but that hasn't stopped them from prospering.

Come on, if you've EVER seen a western movie (and there are lots of good ones, so start renting), you know that Cowtown is Fort Worth, not San Antonio. It shouldn't take a Texan to point this out...

San Antonio, by the way, is hardly a "cowtown", anyway: It's the 9th largest city in the US, ahead of Detroit(10), San Jose(11), Indianapolis(12), and San Francisco(13), and it's the center of a lot of interesting telecom activity, including, unfortunately, telemarketing. (Source: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0763098.html)

Re:Explain This, Please

[Bob Uhl]

Did I miss anything?

Yeah--Utah is a nasty place to live. It's illegal to homebrew, the state's run by Mormons, and AFAICT the entire place is about as dead as the rock which makes up most of the state.

I'd rather have offices in North Carolina or southern Virginia.

Re:Explain This, Please

[betis70]

And it has kick-ass Mexican food which makes all the crap here in the Bay Area taste like cow patties in comparison.

"Fresh Mex" should be renamed "Fresh Retch".

Poor business model

[steevo.com]

Lineo was far too specialized for their own good.

I used to work for one of the biggest technology companies, and one of the projects I was working with was a device that was used an imbedded OS. WindRiver was used at first, then after their licencing became far too expensive, they went to Linux. Not having the expertise themselves to develop everything, they went to Red Had. I am not trying to say that RH is everything, but they offered everything this project needed, and at a decent price. If RH didn't get our account, that's OK, as they have other businesses to keep them going.

Lineo does not have that kind of diversification. They are/were far to specialized for their own good.

Biz Plan? Embedded H/w & S/w using Linux

[cmholm]

My recollection is that Lineo is an embedded Linux s/w spinoff from Caldera.

I first paid attention to them a year or so ago when they bought out Rt-Control, a couple of Ryerson U EE's who had developed a non-MMU kernel and a networked microcontroller-on-a-SIMM to go with it.

All of $250 for a complete development kit back in 2000, quite a deal and fun to play with. I hope Jeff Dionne and Michael Durrant remembered to diversify their portfolios! It was a pretty good run for an overgrown master's thesis, eh?

Lineo is behind the power curve

[Falshrmjgr]

One of the problems with Lineo is one of self perception. Did Lineo consider itself an embeded systems company that used Linux? Or a Linux company that focused on embeded devices?

Frankly, the Embeded Linux community (and specifically the Embeded Linux Consortium) needs to band together rather than fracturing, as their real competition is from the WindRivers of the world.

Another issue, is the poor way that Lineo participated in the open source community. Taking, but not giving back. MontaVista is a better example of an embeded linux company that understands the importance of open source community membership and fiscal responsibility.

MontaVista saw the writing on the wall last year May, and laid off 60-70 of its 150 workers, but by doing so, reduced it burn rate, and impressed investors, while Lineo was focused on being a dot-com and building fancy offices.

In the end, it is inevitable that Lineo needed to take this step, but the question is...is it too little, too late?

Re:Lineo is behind the power curve

[jdh28]

Another issue, is the poor way that Lineo participated in the open source community. Taking, but not giving back. MontaVista is a better example of an embeded linux company that understands the importance of open source community membership and fiscal responsibility.

I think this is unfair. Lineo were behind Busybox and uClibc, both under GPL. Erik Andersen is the maintainer of these and he was employed by Lineo until being laid off a few months ago.

john

when will they ever learn?

[Michael_Jarvis]

As a former employee of Merinta (an embedded Linux company that went under in May 2001), I am very sympathetic to the Lineo employees. I guess I was fortunate--at least Merinta never bounced a paycheck, and our CEO (Camillo Martino) gave us a heads-up before we actually ran out of money.

Linux shows so much promise in the embedded market, but it will never get there until companies wise up and start using sound business practices. I am so sick and tired of seeing companies with great ideas and talented people fail because they have incompetent management with poor spending practices.

Having millions of dollars in venture capital funding does not mean your company is "successful" or "wealthy". It means you have been trusted with money to make your idea work. Don't go out and blow the money on Aeron chairs, fancy offices and glitzy parties. Spend it wisely, and use it to get your product out the door. When your company is generating REAL revenue and profit, THEN you can consider celebrating.

Blowing venture capital on stupid things is about the same as maxing out a personal credit card on luxury items in my book. It's just plain stupid.

I feel so passionately about this issue because I've seen so many companies go under, where the workers suffer because of poor management. Enron is a really big example, but there are hundreds if not thousands of "dot-coms" that did the same thing to their workers.

I hope TUXIA is still doing well, and I hope they learn from the mistakes of others in the marketplace.

Re:when will they ever learn?

[Michael_Jarvis]

TUXIA's already dead :-( - see dotcomtod.de (sorry, it's in German). They filed for bankruptcy at the end of February.

That's unfortunate--some of my former Merinta co-workers were picked up by TUXIA after Merinta folded. *SIGH*

Re:when will they ever learn?

[God! Awful]

Blowing venture capital on stupid things is about the same as maxing out a personal credit card on luxury items in my book. It's just plain stupid.

I feel so passionately about this issue because I've seen so many companies go under, where the workers suffer because of poor management. Enron is a really big example, but there are hundreds if not thousands of "dot-coms" that did the same thing to their workers.


But you're ignoring the fact that all companies have poor management. Or at least it seems that way to the employees. Some companies succeed in spite of their poor management and when others fail, it's easy to blame it on their poor management.

I worked for a small company with poor management. Bucking the odds, it turned into a moderate success. Both the founders and the employees made out pretty well. Of course, that was before the tech meltdown.

Now I work for a large company with poor management. Actually it feels more like no management. When your department makes up less than 1% of the bottom line, the decisions from above tend to appear capricious and arbitrary.

-a

A bigger problem...

[IronTek]

I don't think even they were quite sure what they were trying to do!

This of course leads to the conversations above on mis-management and such...but I think it's all connected.

Without a clear vision and capable people to carry out that vision, even a great product like Linux is probably not enough to save you from yourself...

Too bad though...we need more Linux stuff on more things, so eventually, when the masses start to consider to embrace Linux, we can tell them that they already have!

great bootable CD-ROM

[realkiwi]

I have a couple of CD-ROMs that I picked up at interop Paris from the Lineo booth.

I didn't much understand anything more than "we are a Linux embedded consulting firm".

That could have been a niche.

Anyways the CDs are great (especially the credit card sized one) for breathing life into servers with crashed hard disks.

Oh please, make it stop

[The Bungi]

The fact that Linux is ostensibly free is also reportedly a hurdle to design-wins in view of Lineo's royalty proposition.

It's said a lot of embedded engineers regard Linux as "that operating system for pimple-faced computer science nerds dressed in T-shirts they brought at the last 'Star Trek' convention."

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!

Oh my god, this is so good. Take gun, aim at foot, pull trigger. Repeat as needed. Lunix r00lz homies!!1!! Obviously these people never heard of QNX... oops. Too late.

Although Harris still believes he can attain a Microsoft-like status...

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!

This is so pathetic it's not even funny. And it comes from a company that that can't balance a checkbook and bounces payroll checks.

Go ahead, mod the hell out of me. I capped last week.

Problem with Making Money with Linux Services

[Greyfox]

Everyone talks about how you should make money with services. Well a few years ago, I set up a guy with a linux based web server and hacked out some scripts to keep 4 modems dialed out and bonded at the same time. Just recently I ran across his E-Mail address and sent him an E-Mail asking him if I'd pissed him off or something since I hadn't heard from him in ages. He told me no, and the machine I set him up with was still running great.

Having to keep finding new customers is a royal pain in the ass. You're much better off with Windows, where they keep coming back...

Re:Problem with Making Money with Linux Services

[Jason Earl]

You have to sign them up for a support contract. You simply tell your customer that for a modest monthly fee you will monitor the machine, make sure the backups are running, etc. You can also throw in a limited number of "free" emergency service hours or whatever it takes to hook them into signing up.

You then write a cron job that does all of the actual work and sends you an email with a nice report on the overall status of the box. Once a month you forward some of these reports on to your customer along with a little message telling him that everything looks good. You might try to use the information to sell him more hardware or software. Phrases like "disk space is getting low," and "your machine spends a lot of time under heavy load" are very useful for selling these types of added services.

If you are careful with this kind of customer and don't gouge them, you can guarantee a steady income. And since the amount of work required is fairly low, you can have all sorts of customers, all of them completely convinced that you are the most competent computer expert on the planet.

If you are selling Windows solutions, on the other hand, you constantly have to worry that one of your competitors will sell him a solution that actually works. Get a reputation as a hack, and then it becomes impossible to find new customers.

Most small businesspeople have no problems paying for solutions that work. With Linux you can easily undercut your competitors and still make a nice profit.

I've got some lineo products

[Restil]

They sell, among other things, a full linux compatible embedded system that fits completely on a single simm chip (30 and 72 pin varieties). Along with 10mbps ethernet, there are several I/O lines available for interfacing with the outside world. The systems I have run at 33mhz and use extremely low power as well as a sleep mode that uses even less. Basically, it can easily function off of nothing more than a small solar cell. It only needs something like 70 mA at 3.3 volts, even less if ethernet isn't being used.

The big problem with its design is, I don't think it scratches a big itch. Its primary useful application is for prototyping. Any company that makes embedded products might want to develop their software using such a device for testing, but if they plan to produce anything remotely resembling significant quantities, they'll lay out their own embedded design to better fit the application at hand.

Also, except in the tiny portable computer market, extremely low power doesn't make much sense. If the product being developed has no power restrictions tied to it (it gets power from the outlet for instance), then the entire advantage of this device is thrown out the window. I've done an analysis of the chips on their board, and it could be built for 1/4 the price if more power hungry versions were used instead. Also, if this
device will be primarily used for prototyping, and there IS a market for such devices, there's no reason to make them work off solar cells. As long as they remain compatible with low power models, they'll be just as effective, and a whole lot cheaper in the long run. And if they're less expensive people will purchase a LOT more of them.
Even the hobby market could support them if only they were priced more reasonably.

But regardless of all of that, face the fact, Lineo is a legacy dot com company. They spend more money than they have, and it shows.

-Restil

Some fine piece of journalism

[WhaDaYaKnow]

"The landlord reportedly padlocked ..."
"the Utah office reportedly confirmed ..."
"Appeals were reportedly made ..."
"... and Harris was reportedly initially ..."
"Otherwise Lineo was reportedly supposed ..."
"The message was reportedly pretty ..."

And all that in 4 short paragraphs.

Some companies do the decent thing.

[GlenRaphael]

The people in charge know long before all the money runs out that things are in bad shape. It doesn't sound like they notified any of their employees or gave them any warning so that they could look for other jobs. Cripes. People have bills to pay and families to feed. Doesn't anyone have a shred of decency anymore?

Some companies handle this very well. In early 2001 I was working with RJ Mical at a company called Red Jade. We had a decent business model and a good start on a compelling product but launching a new game machine to compete with the GBA is a very expensive and risky proposition. When Ericsson decided to pull the plug and we couldn't find alternate funding due to the dot-com collapse, we had a big company meeting. There was a month's warning before the company officially shut down during which everybody got their expense reports and final paychecks paid and we got severance pay after that in proportion to seniority - I got a month of severance.

Coming back to pick up my check I found RJ had had some shirts made; they said "I joined a startup and all I got was this lousy T-shirt!" :-)

It was sad to see the company disappear, but as such things go, it was handled very well.

What is embedded, anyway?

[RatOmeter]

The embedded systems I've worked on range from (smallest) a 68HC11 based black box with no OS and a 511 byte program to (largest) an x86 based SBC with ROMDOS and a 400K byte program. To me, embedded is the computer in your microwave oven; you can't afford to make one of those with enough memory, etc to support even the most stripped-down version of Linux.

I realize that the term "embedded" cuts a pretty big swath, but I do believe that the majority of embedded systems are teeny-tiny; many of them with no UI at all and the entire OS (if any) & app in an OTPROM, EEPROM or Flash. The bulk of commercial embedded OSes go into things like stand alone data aquisition units, traffic light controllers, toll booth controllers, satellites, remote weather & geological telemetry devices, etc. In most of those cases, Linux and other Unices are *way* overkill.

So, maybe Lineo really was trying to go for the PDA market, but IMO, that's not embedded, PDA's are just small computers.

-

What about Lineo's Patents?

[dmp123]

What I want to know is this.... A while back there was a large debate about Lineo patenting a lot of things related to embedded Linux, which many people said shouldn't have been patentable. Regardless, I was wondering what happens to these patents when the company goes tits up... Do they belong to the company creditors, or do they just disappear? David

OpenDOS available somewhere

[yorick]

In my opinion, the only good thing to come out of the Caldera/Lineo/Noorda bunch is OpenDOS, which was quite cool for when you needed to run some old DOS software without worrying about all sorts of silly licensing laws. I see Lineo doesn't have that available for download any longer--is it still around somewhere?

Re:New Coke

[AvatarADV]

In fact, the Dr. Pepper factory here still has the old, cane-sugar-formula stuff in cans. It's only sold at the factory, though, not shipped anywhere. Dad brought home a couple of six-packs, because I didn't believe there was a difference... but man, you can really tell!

OT -- your sig

[s20451]

The new karma math: 50+5-1=49.

• Remark 1. Karma operations are not commutative. (50+5-1=49; 50-1+5=50)
• Remark 2. Karma operations are not invertible. (49+1-1=49; 50+1-1=49)
• Conclusion. Karma is defined on a non-Abelian semigroup.

It's Friday afternoon and I'm bored ...

Re:OT -- your sig

[blang]

We all feel the pain.

After getting maximum reward for a brilliant article, I got modded down a notch to 49. It's taken me several months of shameless karma-whoring to get back up to 50.

Re:You mean like OSDN?

[YU Nicks NE Way]

Of course...they are, after all, the Official Death Spiral Network, aren't they?

Re:New Coke

[rjamestaylor]

That would be so compelling an argument except one thing: old Coke was still available during the New Coke ("No Coke, Pepsi") fiasco. I know because I lived through the escapade.

Oh, the way the page happened to set in my browser I had to scroll to see the conclusion to your sentence beginning: "I have sadly stopped drinking most soft drinks since I noticed that" and I had already filled in the rest with "my butt no longer fits in chairs with arms."

Hold the bashing! What about Busybox?

[pHalec]

Hang on... How many of you embedded systems people have used Busybox? How about Tinylogin? I found these apps to be invaluable, and Lineo was pitching a large development effort for them.

I, for one, will miss Lineo - and I hope that the Lineo developers will get the respect (and reparations) they are due. They have made great contributions to the use of Linux in the embedded market.

Re:Hold the bashing! What about Busybox?

[volkerdi]

This is true -- busybox is an amazingly useful tool for any kind of small Linux system. It's a crucial part of the Slackware installer. It even includes the ash shell now, enhanced to provide readline-like tab completion and command-line editing. I just grabbed the latest stable and unstable CVS sources, because you just never know.

Another cool thing about Lineo -- they gave away free hackysacks at LinuxWorld. Gotta like that.

Re:Hold the bashing! What about Busybox?

[Fefe]

Busybox and tinylogin were developed by Erik Andersen, not Lineo. They employed him, but those were not Lineo projects and Lineo sacked him a few months ago. See www.codepoet.org.

embedded linux is dead:long live emblinux

[Lumpy]

Lineo was trying to sell an embedded linux to a group of people that can roll their own embedded linux distribution with 3 hours of time after lunch. embedded linux from scratch is far from rocket science and is actually more powerful than anyone's pre-packaged setup. I tried lineo, I reid Hard Hat, I tried pico-linux, I tried midori..

I have better stability, results and faster development with building the whole embedded OS by hand for each project. My projects have a similarity (slackware based filesetup... the only correct filesystem structure) but each is completely custom. from the robot-cam I am chasing the final bugs out of (and to prove to alot of "engineers" at work that you can do amazing things with a 386 + linux that cannot be done with windows) to the amateur rocketry ground control telemetry system I made for the local highschool.. all custom made.

If I made a product that I was going to market I surely would have never bought lineo or any pay-for product.

Re:embedded linux is dead:long live emblinux

[sydb]

I just ran out of mod points, sorry.

The point of free software is you can easily cut out the blood-sucking middle man.

Power migrates in the direction of the end-user. Lineo tried to be a blood-sucking middle man, just like so many other failed companies.

It's the big end-users who are willing to say "We can support this ourselves, we don't need third party services" who could provide a niche for GPL'd software. There's not many around just now, they need to wake up and employ a couple of C coders.

I think both of you are wrong

[partingshot]

new coke

Re:I think both of you are wrong

[rjamestaylor]

By "still available" I meant that it was still possible to buy it. I lived in West Texas at the time and people were stockpiling it. I mean a lot of it. If the taste between Old and Classic were actually different we would have detected it. We didn't. It wasn't. end of story.

Re:I think both of you are wrong

[John Harrison]

Thanks for the pointer

Re:I think both of you are wrong

[John Harrison]

So I admit that the articles indicating a gradual change are correct. Still, have you taste tested corn syrup coke v. cane sugar coke? Can you detect a difference?

I am waiting for sugar beet coke. mmmmmmm..... beety!

Re:I think both of you are wrong

[rjamestaylor]

This is why Jolt Cola came out (circa 1985) with "All the sugar, Twice the Caffiene" -- the Sugar is cane sugar. Yes, it does taste different. Also, if you want (up until the mid 90's at least) sugar cane Coke, go to Mexico.

Re:I think both of you are wrong

[John Harrison]

go to Mexico.

That is what I have been saying! Have you been reading my posts?

Other countries that seem to have better Coke, at least according to my taste buds: Brazil, Taiwan, France.

I would guess that in most places cane sugar is less expensive than in the US. The price in the US is artificially high due to import restrictions meant to protect the corn market and the inefficient cane growers in Florida (who happen to be big polluters). I would guess that Hawaii benefits as well.

The US is trying hard to import more and more HFS (high fructose syrup) into Mexico. Mexico is responding by putting a 20% tax on all soft drinks that have HFS instead of cane sugar. This has been reported in the USA as a tax on ALL softdrinks, which is simply misinformation meant to serve US interested. I also think that the Coke in the USA doesn't want people to realize that a switch was pulled on them. Most of the Coke in Mexico is HFS-free still.

Lineo was not really behind Busybox and uClibc

[andersen]

As maintainer of Busybox and uClibc, I can tell you quite definately that both efforts were the result of my efforts, and were only grudgingly supported by Lineo at best. I tried very hard while there to paint it as if Lineo was 100% behind these projects, but that really just wasn't the case. They did help, some, and did let me work on busybox, some. But while still employed at Lineo, I still did the majority of the work on busybox and uClibc during my evenings and weekends I am sorry to say.

I've not been with Lineo for 8 months now, so its actually been more than just a dew months. Both projects are doing quite well, and I am very glad that I had the forsight to move them both off of Lineo's servers. My biggest concern now is that my wife and I are expecting a baby next month., and we pay for COBRA insurance through Lineo. If Lineo goes under we are without insurance... So I'm really hoping they pull through somehow!

Re:Lineo was not really behind Busybox and uClibc

[jdh28]

Erik,

In that case I apologise for speaking on your behalf. I've been a regular user of Busybox for a while on several different projects, both for embedded work and for rescue disks, etc, and I appreciate all the hard work you (and others) have put in.

It's a shame to hear that Lineo have treated you and the community so shabbily.

Regards,
john

Re:Lineo was not really behind Busybox and uClibc

[andersen]

I have no complaints really. I got paid while I was there, and paid pretty well, all things considered. So they put food on my table and gave me the interest in doing embedded Linux work. But my day job was mostly to work on things like porting the uClinux kernel to run on Atmel's at91 arm7tdmi cpus, and things like that. Busybox and uClibc work was really a bit of a divirsion.

Re:New Coke

[istartedi]

Nevermind the (subtle) difference in taste. When you pour Coke that uses corn syrup over ice, it builds an obnoxious head. At least, that's a problem that seemed to develop for no good reason that I could think of, other than a change in Coke. Maybe our water quality changed. Possibly, your ice cubes got rougher which caused more bubbles. Either way it's a moot point because I can't drink Coke any more. Too much acid. Too much sugar. Too much caffeine.

Re:The best quote....

[n7ytd]

No, this is the best quote:

He gave the impression necessary financial infusions have been piecemeal and sporadic. He also said that he would go to bat for the employees and that if he didn't get his way, "I'm outta here."

Oooh, what a threat from the big, bad CEO! If the company folds due to lack of funding, he's outta here! Kinda like the other employees, eh?

QNX

[Jason_Knx]

"Embedded experts claim the embedded space is practically impossible to play in these days if all you have is an operating system, especially when the OS is basically immaterial to the embedded designer."

Have they ever heard of QNX. As far as I can see they are pretty much just an OS company with a very good product that is doing well. They have partnerships with other companies to provide the necessary hardware for specialized systems. Also it can run on a x86 architecure.

How can experts claim this when there are companies out there that are successful and don't seem to be doing anything that's impossible? And how's the OS "immaterial" when it's the interface to the hardware being used?

Lame insults in the article

[Alex Belits]

It's said

By whom? Microsoft spekeperson for Windows CE, that is trying to pretend to be an embedded system for many years already?

a lot of embedded engineers regard Linux as "that operating system for pimple- faced computer science nerds dressed in T-shirts they brought at the last 'Star Trek' convention."

There aren't "a lot of embedded engineers" in the whole world -- even though, embedded systems are widespread, designing them is a relatively rare occupation, just like while plastics are everywhere, chemists and companies that develop them aren't that numerous.

So what happens to DR-DOS now?

[dublin]

Lineo wound up owning DR-DOS after the split from Caldera, which just kep the Linux stuff. So what will happen to DR-DOS now? It was always a better DOS than Microsoft's. Here's hoping they turn it loose, along with thier DOS web browser (which, to be honest, was really doggy.)

It's too bad that Caldera caved in to Microsoft and settled instead of holding their feet to the fire - the DR-DOS suit evidence that was buried by that settlement would have made the antitrust case far stronger than it was anyway...

Re:New Coke

[John Harrison]

Dublin Dr. Pepper is bottled in Dublin, Texas, and you can order it online from their webpage, which I just linked to, again!

Re:New Coke

[John Harrison]

You seem to be right! I have been brainwashed! However, the switch appears to have happened gradually (a few % a year) and it seems that it was only completed just as New Coke came out.

Re:New Coke

[John Harrison]

It is shipped from the factory. You can order it on the internet at www.dublindrpepper.com. I bothered to link to it in the parent post. Also, you can get it in glass bottles, which is even better than the can. Finally, I purchase it at the local fancy-pants market, where it goes for $1.50 for a 12 oz bottle. That is, I used to purchase it.

System doesn't work that way.

[fm6]

It doesn't sound like they notified any of their employees or gave them any warning so that they could look for other jobs.

Face it, the whole system penalizes that kind of honesty. If you're running a big company, and you keep your troubles secret, you might be able to save the company -- and your job. But if you're too open, the investors will bail on you, and you'll find yourself out of a job -- even if the company itself survives. You might consider it selfish to put your own job security above that of your workers. But isn't the whole system built on precisely that kind of selfishness?

It's not just employees that get screwed, of course.

• Companies that are short of cash often resort to "Accounts Payable financing": ordering supplies they know they can't afford. If things turn around, they can pay off then. And if they don't, it doesn't really matter how much you owe, does it. Well, it doesn't matter to you. The suppliers might feel differently.
• Your customers are presumably going around assuming you'll still be in business tomorrow. If you don't tell them you're in trouble, they're screwed. But if you do tell them, you're screwed. Consider the typical airline bankruptcy. Never announced until the planes stop flying -- much to the dismay of people who haven't quite made it home yet.

Need I go on?

Lineo obtains $1M additional funding

[unsung]

FYI. I just read this article.
http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS4958883656.html

Um, what about redhat?

[autopr0n]

Redhat seems to be doing fine...

What does(did) lineo do?

[autopr0n]

Oddly enough, I'm still not exactly sure what they were trying to do.

WTF? I realize that slashdot editors aren't known for being well-informed, but doesn't it bother anyone else that they seem to be flaunting their ignorance on the front page?

CT doesn't know what Lineo did. So what? He doesn't own an embedded systems company does he? He wasn't exactly their target market. What Lineo did is quite clear from their website, they were a service company that would help you put Linux on embedded systems.

So if you designed pda/mp3player/gps/whatever hardware and thought putting Linux on it would be a good idea, you would go to these guys and get them to hook you up for a fee. A couple years later, when you came out with a new model or something else or whatever, you'd go back. It's not that fucking complicated. And the fact that the 'average' slashdotter might not know what they do didn't matter, because they couldn't give a shit about you either.

"Community support" won't put food on the table

[Zico]

Just ask Indrema, Loki, or VA Whatever. In fact, of the main Linux distributions, Red Hat is way up there in terms of being criticized by the Linux community ("The Microsoft of the Linux world," and other such charges), yet they've been the most prosperous of all of them.

Don't feel too bad

[fm6]

Our employees who had thousands in expenses owed to them that they will never see - I feel bad for them, but then again, the executives (me included) got screwed for our last few weeks of pay and all vacation pay which we were able to scrape together for all the employees.

In other words, you reached into your own pockets to minimize the hurt to your people. Good for you.