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VA buys LHS, Enlightened Solutions
Lazzaro wrote in with the most
exciting thing I've seen all day: A TechWeb article about VA (Research) buying Linux Hardware Solutions and
mandrake's company, Enlightened Solutions. It goes on to say VA will regroup into three separate groups: an
apparently RHAD-like development division, a web unit for Linux.com, and a systems group.
It appears that Red Hat and VA Research now have real potential to "hit it big". Given the current media buzz about Linux, it seems likely that an IPO would (or should I say will!) make these guys very very rich.
I admit to being a little unsettled by this possibility. While both companies have acquired a fair amount of serious Linux talent in recent months, I can't help feeling that they are to some extent still cherry picking the financial rewards of the Linux development community, without having to do any of the "heavy lifting".
I don't think VA Research has been much of a force in Linux development, though they hope to change that (though that raises its own issues). Red Hat has more history to it... and RPM is nice... but I don't see them as having made any really decisive contributions to date.
I'm concerned that if VA and/or Red Hat go public, and hit market caps of a substantial fraction of a billion dollars, that this will fundamentally change the nature of their relationship with the Linux development community that has sustained them until now. Going from the other end of the spectrum, Sun has announced that they will open much of the source code for Solaris... but who wants to hack on that, when Sun will reap most of the financial rewards? What happens when the market christens VA or Red Hat as the corporate face of Linux, and the bucks really start to flow? Will the development community dry up? Could the code base become another Mozilla project, where people can't clearly distinguish the "common good" from the "corporate good"?
WordPerfect isn't name-brand? WordPerfect was the word processor for years. IMHO, WP 5.1 was the best word processor ever created.
I'd agree that there are few name-brand desktop apps, but none is incorrect.
Since when is consolidation a good thing? Unless you own a piece of the company it's a terrible thing. Remember, less competition means higher prices, the MS trial should have shown people that by now. Not that VA could possibly make their systems any more overpriced.
Somehow, I don't believe that VA is hiring all these people and buying all this stuff from it's own profits.
I thing it's gotta be either that have a friendly banker who believes in thier buisness plan and they are getting pretty deep in debt, or there is some huge outside investor that is hopping they come through and make him rich or something...
Anyone point to a detailed report of where the money comes from?
Let me try to understand this:
1) Microsoft is big
2) Microsoft employs anti-competitive tactics
3) Linux emerges
4) Microsoft is no longer invincible
5) Any linux company that makes money is like Microsoft
Ahh.... if that's the way it goes, then remind me never to try to make any money in the Linux market. I might be accused of trying to get a monopoly.
"There are still soft spots for Linux, however. For example, there are no name-brand desktop productivity applications available for it yet, though Lotus is considering a port of SmartSuite."
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--Kit
Former Inmate, VA Linux Sanitarium
Mandrake's company enlightened solutions inc. was not a competeitor to VA. He was working on a high availability web server (apache) that suported rollover and distributed usage...
With any luck, the collaboration with LHS will result in them selling boxes that a home user would actually think of buying. And I hope those VA guys don't forget where they came from, and don't forget about the starving college kids who can't afford their U2W Xeon screamer ... it would be a shame to see them forgetting about their roots in the process of getting big.
As far as I can tell, this is a lot like "IBM buys Compaq" - it's a merger, and mergers have a nasty tendancy of reducing competition and producing all sorts of ugly growing pains in both companies.
What's good about this news? What it means to me is fewer options and less consumer choice.
Of course I might just be bummed by the fact that I wanted to recommend a VA Research system to a client, but they wanted a far lower-end machine than VA provides. What happened to their $ 1,300 machine? It was all this small company really needed.
D
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This is the best news I've ever heard. I have always been glad that VA Research and Linux Hardware Solutions have been out there selling boxes with Linux from the get-go, and I was a bit worried that all the support we've gotten from Dell, Compaq, IBM, and HP that these vendors would get lost in the shuffle. But now with VA Research making itself much bigger, I'm quite sure they will stand strong amidst all the competition.
I'd love to see a /. poll on how many people actually use Office (and how often they use it). I don't think I've used Word once this year; Excel I've used maybe three times (I've never even installed the other apps). If all copies of MS Office were somehow magically removed from the face of the Earth, it wouldn't bother me a bit. I'd probably like to have the disk space back anyway.
So why does every stinkin' Linux story have to harp on that "But there's no Office apps yet, so Linux is still pretty immature..." theme? Is that the measure of an OS? Whether it has an Office suite or not?! Is this all people care about? (And if it is, what about ApplixWare, Koffice, StarOffice and Wordperfect?)
Maybe Linux doesn't have a place on the desktop after all. Anyone overly worried about Linux's "lack" of an Office suite shouldn't be using Linux anyway. It just disturbs me when what could have been an otherwise cool article (maybe with something about, say, future architectures or plans for linux.com, or reassureances about LHS) gets bogged down on that Office thing (it takes up 1/3 of the article fer cryin' out loud...).
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Does it really matter if Office gets ported or not? Here's the chance for all those products out there who've been crushed by MS product nepotism to see some action. I mean, I use MS Office at work, but I've found that Wordperfect was actually a lot better proggie at my level of usage. Let's see some other stuff that relies on good quality rather than market share to sell coming onboard.
_______________________ I am the eggman, wooo! _______________________
The reasoning is something like this...
Pointy-haired bosses control computer procurement money.
Pointy-haired bosses use M$ Office.
Therefore, computers must have M$ Office.
Like you, I rarely use Office, but on occasion I am
required to halt real work and make viewgraphs that the
aforementioned bosses can understand.
Also, sometimes my productivity threatens to exceed some
predetermined limit, so I must "spin down" and I use M$
Office to do so. It excels at wasting time and effort.
"WHY DOES IT KEEP INDENTING EVERYTHING!?!?!?!? Well,
I'll just highlight this word and select... AIEEE! NO!
BASTARD REDMOND HELLSPAWN, THAT'S NOT SUPPOSED TO BE
IN A BOLD FONT!!!! AARRRGHHH!!"
-G