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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
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.
I've got 40 strong reasons why Linux will have a powerful desktop presence in the near future and Microsoft is running scared,
Care to list them?
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.
I've got 40 strong reasons why Linux will have a powerful desktop presence in the near future and Microsoft is running scared
Linux fanatics have been saying this for a *number* of years now. I got into Linux three years ago and used it exclusively. Every issue of Linux Magazine and Linux Journal that was released at the time sang the success stories of Linux, and how mainstream Linux adoption was just around the corner.
Well, it's three years later, and Linux still only appeals to a very small subset of computer users.
I think Linux had its chance to make it big when the stock market hype was building up around it. Unfortunately, it missed this chance by being unusable by the average person as a desktop OS, and a financially unsound choice to build companies or business strategies around (*cough* Corel *cough* *cough*).
Linux will, of course, never die. But I don't suspect that we will we see a significantly huge increase in the Linux userbase.
Especially now, with the arrival of Mac OS X - many Linux users, tired of waging constant (and unproductive) sysadmin war, switched when OS X was released *raises hand*. Hopefully someone will release a well-supported (in terms of both industry-standard software and hardware) UNIX variant for PCs with a consistent user interface experience. As far as I'm concerned, Linux doesn't cut it here. Linux offers choice, which is good when you're knowledgeable enough to make those kind of decisions. But the average Joe Blow doesn't want 30 different GUIs on his computer.
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
I've got 40 strong reasons why Linux will have a powerful desktop presence
Funny, I can only think of one: Open Office (/Star Office). Then again, I can only think of one reason why M$ have a strong desktop presence: MS Office. I mean, seriously, everything else has a non MS equivalent which is better. But in terms of a proprietary standard which everyone has to have, its MS Office. Just for Word alone they dominate the market.
Even MS know this - I can't see them issuing a version of MS office for Linux until they are facing a real risk of a minority share of the office market. Which is why they have never issued a version of office for Linux.
As for the rest, well. Photo editing? GIMP, PSP, Photoshop. Whatever. If you are a professional you may want all three. Video editing? Get an iMac now. And so on. But office dominates, and will continue to do so for a long while, at least in terms of file formats.
Having said all of that, I'm incredibly impressed with the open office stuff. Its great on Linux, but its probably even better for having a win 32 version. I can think of a heap of computers that I could install that on. Its version 1.0, it will still lose out feature wise with MS office, but from what I can see of it, most end users won't care for what it doesn't have.
By MS own figures, over 90% of feature requests for the next version of office are already implemented in the current version - most users have no idea of how to use even a fraction of the features. Thus, most users will like open office, and its good enough now to use now, even though it doesn't come close to the full feature set of MS office. And I don't doubt that version 2 will become very threatening to MS.
Anyway, 'nuff said - my 2c worth
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
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
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.
Caldera bought SCO, and thus has a HUGE Unix market share... they will not be going anywhere.
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.
Hiya Eliphas. LTNS. Let me just add something to your post...
Conectiva will not only be selling Caldera products in Brazil. It will be taking over the whole Caldera operation on Latin America, including consulting and support works. I was not mentioned on the PR, but I think it also include SCO and friends.
morcego
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!
You know, it's possible that they were part of the layoff. Caldera did drop 73 people, after all. Upper management isn't necessarily immune to cuts.
If people really want to figure out this puzzle, look to see if Caldera replaces Drew Spencer and Harrison Colter. If not, they were part of the cut. If Caldera hires a new CTO and a new chief legal counsel, then it's safe to conclude that Drew and Harrison quit unexpectely.
Don't jump to conclusions.
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 think he was hoping that you would guess what they were (they're not too hard to figure out, right?).
I must be really slow today, I didn't see a list of 40 or any reference to 40 anything elsewhere in the thread. <shrug>
Your points would all be valid if Linux was primarily a desktop OS, like MacOS 9 or Windows 9x.
... but the truth is not many people really care. The server market is where the real money is at, anyway.
The truth is, not many people aside from enthusiasts, students, software developers or sysadmins use Linux on the desktop. I personally always used to develop software on Linux since 1996. I recently switched to using Windows XP with Cygwin, using XEmacs/Win and the MSVC++ 6.0 debugger as my development environment. (IMHO!!) It beats using XEmacs and ddd (or gdb) hands down.
All that aside, walk into any server room and you'll see Linux _everywhere_. Admins can set up servers to their heart's content without having to worry about getting audited for it. Most IT managers by now have realized the TCO advantage of going with Linux/*BSD, and if they don't go Linux/*BSD its because general cluelessness (this is a major problem among IT managers) of political reasons.
For smaller shops going for a Dell or IBM Linux server is almost a no-brainer. For bigger Sun Enterprise-using shops, they're phasing out their older servers with these shiny Dell and IBM rackmounts as well. While Sunfire servers are still pretty much unmatched, IBM's Linux on Big Iron hardware must be scaring the shit out of Sun.
All this is just the tip of the iceberg, in my opinion. I haven't even mentioned how fast Linux servers are quietly eroding MS Exchange and MS file/print serving marketshare.
So, yes, Linux is years behind in terms of desktop useability
>>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
Hmmm. let's see...
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
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/