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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."
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
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
Caldera is dying.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
They're not releasing the source for their proprietary stuff. Which makes them evil
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/
Caldera bought SCO, and thus has a HUGE Unix market share... they will not be going anywhere.
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.
Silly person. That the comedian Jonathan Katz. You know, from the old Comedy Central Show, Dr Katz.
Try per seat licensing. THey are charging an arm and a leg for a so called free operating system and all there unix apps are proprietary. Ransom Love at one time believed in opensource. This was right before he purchased sco. Appearently the sco employees convinced him otherwise. Also not to mention they were supposed to opensource unix and make a low cost distro based on the real thing. He paniced at the last minute and just released some very old 1970's source under a restricted license. He then stated some nasty comments about linux and agreed with Microsoft that the gpl was VIRAL! Ouch. This guy should keep his mouth shut and step down. If I was an investor I would of tried to get this guy canned along time ago but now its too late. In other words you get alot more for less money under any other distro and you do not have a draconian EULA. Think about it. The whole reason Linux even exists is that users were tired of paying for and living under oppressive EULA's of proprietary operating systems. What caldera did was get linux, then try to make it as bad as Windows. I can trust RedHat a hell of alot more then Caldera.
This is a shame because my distro was caldera openlinux lite version 1.1. Those days are long over and its time for caldera to go. May they rest in peace.
http://saveie6.com/
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
Caldera has done more for Linux than most any company I can think of. For example:
-Created that graphical interface you see on every installation nowadays. No more boot/root disks and console difficulties.
-Pioneered the concept of the automatic linux update utility for automatic updates of security patches, upgrades, etc.
-Created WebMin, which is a fantastic tool and a lot of distributions use now.
Furthermore, when Caldera bought SCO - they released the source code for it. How many other flavors of commercial UNIX have you got source code access to?
Kris
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?
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
>>agreed with Microsoft that the gpl was VIRAL!
don't be a jackass. The GPL is viral. Thats the whole point of the GPL. Microsoft says thats a negative. Stallman says it's a positive. That doesn't change the fast that by its very nature it is viral.
If you incorporate any GPL code into your code the GPL takes over. That fits my definition of viral.
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."
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
The GPL is viral. Thats the whole point of the GPL. Microsoft says thats a negative. Stallman says it's a positive.
Have you looked up the meaning of viral? "of, relating to, or caused by a virus" I don't think that quite applies.
I think infectious would apply better, but it still has a negative connotation. Perhaps transitive?
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
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 Microsoft was trying to do was to scare software vendors from porting their apps to linux by saying if your program statically links to the glibc library, then you must gpl it. Utterly false and typical fud. Viral was the term used to make it look like the gpl would keep spreading and spreading through anything which happens to touch it. Most IT managers just scoffed at this. However I was just at zdnet.com the other day and found a comment from a user who was supprised that sun could charge for the linux version of StarOffice. He assumed it would have to be freed because the gpl would spread to the program. I guess someone bought into the fud.
I look at a gpl program more like a plant or vine. As it grows, more branches develop and it keeps growing in size and complexity but it certainly does not infect other organisms around it. Only the program or the kernel that is gpl-ed is effected.
You sure sound like a troll.
Anyway Love alienated the linux community by violating the trust and very spirit of the community. If the kernel is not gpl-ed then its not linux. And yes I do trust Redhat to keep Linux more open then Caldera anyday.
http://saveie6.com/