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Love Says Caldera's Doing Fine, Despite Losses
sanpitch writes: "Caldera is barely scraping along, (in contrast to little brother Lineo, which may not survive). Their latest move is to close the Chelmsford and Erlangen offices, as well as lay off 73." At least not Noel Coward writes: "The bad financial report out of Caldera yesterday is actually good news, says Ransom Love in an interview on Linux and Main. Now, he says, they're ready to go forward with their grand strategy, which unfortunately has nothing at all to do with desktop Linux as we know it."
Caldera ClosedLinux was just about the worst linux distro I'd ever seen...
First: Love Says Caldera's Doing Fine
then.. Caldera is barely scraping along. Those statements are mutually exclusive.
(in contrast to little brother Lineo, which may not survive)
In contrast to? If Caldera are 'barely scraping along' then surely they might not survive either.
The bad financial report out of Caldera yesterday is actually good news
That makes absolutely no sense.
This story sounds like a giant spoof. Noel Coward.. (of "Only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the mid-day sun" fame?).. And 'Ransom Love'? Eh?
Is Slashdot trying to be The Onion of tech stories? If so, do your homework, this is only funny because of how stupid it is.
mogorific carpentry experiments
It was THE worst linux distro I'd ever seen.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
f caldera.
and what the hell kind of name is "ransom love"? shouldn't he be serenading some hairy italian women on balconies?
M$ no longer has the monopoly on bullshit.
To use Love's term, they are "streamlining" their business.
They may find themselves streamlined out of business soon.
I have been pwned because my
well, afturd we proform sum more magical # FUDging, we'll be abull to pay some more yacht fuel fewsures to ransom. doN'T ya just love IT?
Caldera is dying.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
Of trying sell stuff nobody wants. Ok other linux distros aren't exactly rolling in cash but Caldera has got to be having the most trouble of any of the top five. I mean you know a company is in trouble when they have to make an anouncement about how everything is ok.
I'd be more worried about
"its chief technology officer, Drew Spencer, and chief legal counsel, Harrison Colter, have left the company"
Is this a rats jumping a sinking ship or somehow just bad timing?
In other news, Caldera says Love is all we need. Back to you, Jill!
As this is Slashdot
All news has to be good news
If it's on Linux.
what they are still around, they used to make a crapy linux distro right? I almost forgot about them
... the 'properterial' version of Leenooks?
I know that this post may start a large discussion, but I just absolutely feel like saying something. Caldera was definitely in the game a few years ago, but the momentum which they had has been usurped by RedHat and some other distros. Caldera is now a large company which will soon be a small one. It seems that the main reason that Caldera is hurting right now is they simply lack vision. Love talks about selling to server-side clients and Unix clients, but it seems that this focus has changed from his mentioned graphical install and the desktop presence of Linux, something which he once thought that Linux could achieve. This interview shouldn't have taken place. If he doesn't have a business plan, he should do something about it or step down and find someone who can get a vision for Caldera. The last thing we need is to hear of another Linux company which isn't on the ball. Especially with the successes of new releases of OpenOffice, KDE, Mozilla, WineX, etc. (although WineX could arguably be a failure for Linux strategically).
I've got 40 strong reasons why Linux will have a powerful desktop presence in the near future and Microsoft is running scared, and Caldera needs to wake up and stop trying to market to the wrong target. And no, I'm not biased about Linux, I've just done my research. I'm prepared to remain in the top of the software industry no matter what curve balls come my way.
./cwide
soul daddies in a firewire tumble dryer
Ransom and Caldera have always been rather "offbeat" members of the Linux community. I see no problems with them further withdrawing from the community into the proprietary software world - which is where I think Love is planning to take them. This recent spate of business "writing off" or "taking" losses is in part due to the Enron scandal. No company wants to be seen as hiding losses which might be discovered by the SEC, plantiff lawyers for shareholders' lawsuits, etc.. So no surprise as many other companies are rushing to confess losses.
You shank my Jengaship!
This could be bad news. Very bad news.
to create FUD for the OS which they love the best. Kind of self-defeating, huh? M$ is probably laughing their heads off right now. Caldera, you sucked. goodbye.
who actually cares if caldera disappears .....
Caldera, our beloved penguin, is in desperate need. Apparently, he is being held for Ransom by Mr. Love. For 10 million dollars, Mr. Love will release him, and once the Ransom is paid, things will be back to normal.
The bad financial report is actually good news. Yeah, good in a sense they can MAYBE show a little profit, or atleast a decline in losses. However, (comma) it is never a good thing to put a "happy" statement right next to the statement that says how many people they are laying off...remonds me of my former employer:
www.lucent.com
Sent from your iPad.
Jon Katz is going to be on letterman. watch the man make bad arguments in real life!
They share and make illegal copies of all their music, they steal bandwidth. Man! Will they stop at nothing?
I would hate to hear someone say that. We don't need more reasons to enforce crazy laws!
-- A cat is no trade for integrity!
The bad news is actually good.
:)
Yeah, right
The more sunshine management spreads around, the more likely rain is in the forcast.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Love Says Caldera's Doing Fine
That sounds like the beginning to a really dreadful country song.
--saint
Frankly ;) my current opinion on Caldera is not very flattering. Frankly, I do not know anything concrete about them, I just have the image, that they have tried to knock multiple doors to enter the desktop. Now, I read that they are not aiming to hit the desktop. Frankly, I do not have any hunch on why buy something from Caldera.... I just think that they decided to choose "business customers" to have better change to survive only by effective lobbying and no realworld evidence.
I have not used any time to find out what Caldera really is, or wants to be, but this is what they have been able to communicate to me so far - not very convincing. By looking at their financial figures I assume they have been able to communicate the same image to others as well.
Redhat, instead, might not be "that" different, but they have been able to create an image, that they are thriving to do something concrete and something that might become beneficial - Caldera just is - atleast for now.
Oh, wait, that would assume that RH is making real (as opposed to pro forma) profits. Never mind.
Maybe Caldera will get lucky and sell themselves to either HPaq ot IBM.
Why worry they will be gone soon
Microsoft has conceded to the nine 'rebel states' who have filed a lawsuit against them for 'providing services American citizens don't want.'
Microsoft press agent, Uri Frah, said: "This is a good outcome for all parties involved although not for Microsoft. We are, however, optimistic about the outcome of this case, and our shareholders should be delighted with this turn of events in light of the recent events as respective to the relevance of the outcome to this announcement."
Bill Gates was said to be 'depressingly happy' about the outcome.
if Caldera simply went belly up. I mean that way it would take the last remenents of SCO out with them. I mean SCO really sucks and since Caldera sucks too that actually would be twice as good.
This sounds pretty weird. Usually they have celebrities or people with interesting opinions on there (recent guests include Tom Waits, Mary Tyler Moore, Hugh Grant).. who the hell outside of Slashdot has heard of Jon Katz?
Good luck to him though. Perhaps he'll be making a guest appearance in Friends next.
mogorific carpentry experiments
Conectiva announced this week that it's going to sell Caldera products here in Brazil.
Use the fish, luke.
eliphas
Why does everyone seem to hate Caldera so much, I mean what did they do? Aren't they a Linux distribution that has been around for a while? What is the problem? I would have thought that they are the good guys. I know not eveybody likes every distribution, but you don't see too as much of this desire for a linux version too disappear. Lots of people hate Debian or Slackware for being too hard. Many people dislike Mandrake for being too easy. Yeah people will say "Mandrake sucks, get a real distro" but you don't see "Mandrake sucks, I hope they fold" So what makes Caldera deserving of more venom than usual?
Don't think Caldera ever supported desktop Linux. For Caldera, RedHat, VA I.O.U. it was a brief experiment. Caldera and RedHat went embedded and VA I.O.U. dissappeared.
This posting to slashdot was just a cheap way to find out public opinion of Caldera. Now that it is known, Caldera will be tucking their tail between their legs and running away...
Yes, Caldera deserves to run out of the Linux bussiness.
Mr. Love with his anti-GPL stance has managed to
alienate too many linux users. I am glad they
are out of Linux.
Caldera OpenLinux was my first Linux distro a few years ago. It really helped me get started; it had a graphical install, which was a novelty at the time (complete with a game, Tetris, I believe) and a great manual to help you get going with KDE. Without Caldera, I probably would have never gotten into Linux. Now years later, Caldera makes you buy per seat licenses (!) for OpenLinux, has a slow development cycle and it seems to ignore GNOME completely. Other disstros have passed it by in the ease of installation and use. Sad.
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
I DO!
"The Community" loses a really dodgy distro from a company that doesn't understand open source.
What have Caledra actually done for Linux, in the past 2-3 years? (Yes, that was a serious question.)
I don't know a single person who has even considered using OpenLinux in any way, shape or form. Maybe that's why they're dying.
Caldera bought SCO, and thus has a HUGE Unix market share... they will not be going anywhere.
I told that to my bank once while dealing for a House loan...
My bad financial report is actually good news...
Now, I live in a fridge recycled box...
Am i the only one who uses Caldera? Its always gave me what i needed, with much less fuss then the others.. More geared to business users...
True they have given little back to the community lately, but is that a crime, or just someting to be frowned apon?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Don't know much about Caldera's Linux, but Ransom Love is an idiot. Anyone else remember when he said he has done more for Free Software than RMS? Ummm.....yeah. In the immortal words of Dr. Forrseter to TV's Frank: "that's an interesting world you've created for yourself there..."
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
I bought in at 15
'nuff said.
Now *that* comes as no big surprise. We tried to use the Moreton Bay (I guess they're called "Snap" now) line of NAT gateways but the prices kept going UP. When we could buy NAT gateways for less than $100 and these things were going past $250 we could no longer justify recommending them even though their use of Linux made them easier to admin (from our standpoint).
What do we do now? We use freeSCO on salvaged 486 boxes with no hard drives unless we need a full blown firewall... then we install SuSE 8.0 and use their firewall and/or netfilter. We've also not fallen for the $1,000 linux-based "firewall" distributions which license 10 or 20 internal IP addresses... hell, we can build the entire firewall for less than that and have unlimited internal IPs.
In my opinion (which is worth every nickel you've paid for it) the Linux-based companies are still struggling to find a profitable niche. Except for companies like ours, which simply design and build working solutions using open-source tools on an individual basis. We don't have "products", we just go in, solve their problems and leave. Oddly enough, they're happy to pay us to do that.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
As a caldera stockholder and previous beta tester, I've been a caldera fan for a long time. When they were involved heavily in the desktop arena, they had the best distribution without-a-doubt. They pioneered so many things which are common to our distributions today, like the graphical installation (no more boot/root disks!), the automatic update utilities, and they even created WebMin.
However, they're in bad shape now. Their stock price was hovering around 1.00 a few months ago and so they decided to do a reverse stock split 4-1. Yup, I've now got 4x less shares, and guess what the stock price is? It's a 1.02 as of this morning! Now, they've chased out all of the institutional investors because the float isn't even large enough to allow for large share blocks. I don't know what that management team is doing, but they had better get their act together quickly.
Once predicted a few years back by Linux Journal as being 1 of the 3 linux companies that would make it through the dot-com burst and software buzz (the other two being redhat and va linux), I'm starting to have my doubts.
Kris
This really one article people should read to the END before commenting on. Sounds like Caldera has a good business plan and a decent strategy - too bad one has to read the whole thing to see what it is.
Really shows how poor the commenting is, or the moderation, or whatever it is....
Be nice to have a discussion about the what the Caldera business model really is, as opposed to this sort of tripe. They have all those SCO resources, which is intriguing, to say the least.
1) How did Ransom Love get a name like that?
2) If I change my name to a powerful name of that sort, will I be more successful in life?
I had a promo copy of Caldera 1.3, the first with the Lizard install. It is still great.
Howsomeever, there were really stupid quality control problems with the version. xinitrc was hosed, along with 10 other problems with text files. It would only run as root. I compiled a list with fixes for the newbies, and had the audacity to suggest it be posted on the home page as errata. Caldera told me to stuff it.
By the way, that was the first and last time my manager looked at the highly touted Linux. "What a piece of crap!" was his comment.
Hey Ransom, quality and execution matter. You couldn't manage a janitorial business.
sami = shitty native people in norway
try biting your ear while claping your hands... good, now you look like a moron
To which I thought, "Yeah, 'Downsizing.' Meaning 'We're getting rid of those pesky customers.'" They went bankrupt shortly thereafter.
Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
I was a beta tester of some of Moreton Bay's dedicated firewall gear (later Lineo, now Snapgear), and it's VERY GOOD stuff. Alas, their $250+ prices just cannot compete with a (technically somewhat inferior, but still adequate) $99 D-Link or Netgear unit. Granted, the low-end D-Link doesn't have remote logging or VPN capabilities, but it's really, really hard even for a dedicated Linux advocate like me to pony up 2.5 times the price for functionality I don't use. I like and respect the Moreton/Lineo/Snapgear folks, but they have a really rough price point problem.
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
This is like the dreaded vote of confidence. It comes right before the end.
The bad financial report out of Caldera yesterday is actually good news
That makes absolutely no sense.
Read the article, not the /. blurb! Love never made any such statment in the article. Timothy botched the recap. The closest statement that I can pick out which may correspond to what Sanpitch was trying to summarize was:
Ransom Love: I hate to take a negative and entirely make it into a positive, but in reality some of it is just the ongoing work of streamlining the business, and, frankly, we're making tremendous progress there.
Translation: "I really hate sounding like I'm full of s**t, but one of my responsibilities as CEO is to put a positive spin on "screwing the pooch". So I'm going to put the blame the negative quarter on restructuring and streamlining, and we did such a tremendous job, it can only get better from this point."
(Rant: I submit a wonderful article on how IIS grew market share at the height of the "Code Red" contagion, and it gets rejected. Meanwhile, drivel from the CEO of a non-player in the Linux world is given the front page. *rrrrrr*)
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
Well, from a very close and trusted source, Caldera just closed their division that built the product they (used to) sell !
So, what's next ?
Maybe try to have a stock value higher than $1 when a year ago it was in the range of $10 and used to be even much higher...
What's left of the SCO product lines (Tarantella and Vision, basically) is sold by a new company called Tarantella, inc.