Everyone complained about how lame this movie was. Now, all of a sudden, everyone is desperate for for the DVD. Doesn't make sense. Does everyone just LOVE to buy horrible movies on DVD?
Why, for the same reason we all buy DVDs: the extra stuff. The better sound. The ability to hit mute and/or next scene whenever Jar Jar hits the screen.
While Rick didn't see TPM more than once, I did. I liked the movie, but it was not designed to stand alone the way A New Hope was. It's act 1 of a longer story. Empire is still my favorite and I'd buy that on DVD too -- along with the other two. I own the three on video now, but I prefer LaserDisc and DVD formats.
Didn't NeXT do this way back when with GNU software in NeXTStep (I'm specifically thinking of gcc)?
They had a bunch of changes to the Objective-C compiler that were necessary but never rolled in to gcc's main distro. Afaik, they never hid them. They are now a part of the Darwin project last I checked.
On the other hand, if some company violated the copyrights on someone else's non-GPLed software they would find themselves in court. Why exactly should GPL software be any different?
In most cases, as source is closed, that's not an issue. That aside, in most states, one can't sue unless one has demonstrated that one has *tried* to settle differences without a lawsuit and been unsuccessful.
In other words, there's the warning shot across the bow before the courts. Let's see a warning shot across the bow -- IN PRIVATE PLEASE -- before convicting someone in a court of public opinion.
...wouldn't community relations have been better served by a private email to the Be engineers?
Bingo. A lot of the Be folk are just as much friends of open source as anyone. The choice to work at a proprietary OS company is something that I *can* understand, even if Bruce and RMS can't. Be's offices have a vitality and energy (not to mention a whole bunch of old hardware) that I haven't seen often.
I don't see why Bruce had to draw attention to what he already believes is a simple, honest mistake. It would have been more professional to deal with it privately and only make it a community issue if Be ignored him or refused to fix the problem.
I agree. I doubt they would have ignored him or refused to fix the problem, but I'd be willing to bet that they may re-engineer it not to use his code.
A mirror of the offending archive is available at the following URL: ftp://ftp.be.com/pub/gnu/r5/glibc/libroot-obj.tgz.
You will note, if you look that every single other item in the gnu/r5 tree (see? they knew and they were acting clued) has source. I looked quickly, but it does seem that this was an oversight.
It certainly didn't need to be shouted this loudly. Did Bruce actually contact them privately first or did he just yell to the media?
A single omission does not a clueless company make.
No one screamed this loud when Linuxcare's Bootable Business Card was distributed without source (this omission was corrected, but there was a period of several weeks when it was an issue). When I handed one to RMS, he was polite but firm about it (as he should be), but he didn't post it to a web page and submit it to Slashdot.
Everyone loves to jump on the "Scientology sucks!" bandwagon, but let's not lose sight of the fact that 90% of EVERYTHING is crap.
At Linuxchix on Wednesday, we were trying to come up with the whole quote for Sturgeon's law:
"Of course 90% of science fiction is crap. 90% of everything is crap. And half the rest of the time, you had no right to expect that much."
I'm quite ready to believe that Battlefield Earth: The Movie falls into the last category.;)
_Deirdre
Re:Last time, I didn't go to a Tom Cruise movie ..
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Battlefield Earth
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Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman are apparently out of scientology. At least, it's fairly apparent from her interviews over the last year that she is. They deflect questions about scientology that they hadn't in the past. _Deirdre
The Scientologists then announced in 1986 that he had died when only about half the books had been published (but the rest were already written - honest).
The first editions had already in fact been published in an autographed leatherbound edition. You sometimes hear scientologists talking about these as "properties." (meaning Hubbard's autographed works)
Travolta was shopping around for a production company last year and I was in Culver City. I opened the door to the hallway from the office I was in (formerly a soundstage) and there was John Travolta wandering over to the neighboring production studio trying to pitch his movie. In the three feet he crossed while I looked at him, numerous emotions rippled across his face. Honestly, it looked like the guy was severely mentally unstable AND possessed by multiple malicious spirits. And I don't mean scary in the way that Terl is supposed to be scary, but unstable scary. He did not look like someone one wanted to know. Other people in the office were kind of in awe about Travolta, but I just can't see it. I don't even think he's that great an actor. My one regret, given that the movie's finally coming out in an election year, is that I've misplaced the "Terl for President" buttons I got from the 1984 World Science Fiction con. Grr. _Deirdre
They [managers] don't need to know a *thing* about Linux from a technical point of view. What they do need to do is understand the market and what kind of business model a product like Linux calls for and implement that. If the business model is quite different, as you seem to be saying it is, then there's going to be the tendency of many managers to force a square peg in a round hole and that will have to be compensated for.
What has thus far been missed at Linuxcare is the unique fragility of employer-employee relationships for open source developers. Normally, programmers don't want to leave cool projects because they're fun to work on. In open source, the projects go with them -- witness the migration of Raster and Mandrake last year.
Therefore, a company saying "we can pay you to do Cool Stuff" doesn't have the same hold. They can do the SAME Cool Stuff in any of several companies. Thus, if one has politics that suck, well, there's other fish in the sea. And they may well get better pay and meaningful stock options elsewhere too.
And, given that the various Linux companies' stock prices are depressed, it's a great time to move (stock options will be cheaper...). Better to spend time vesting at an already successful company than a wannabe that is spending itself into oblivion.
Of course, what's true for the open source developers is also true for others in the company, but with different skill sets, one expects they might land in different directions and have greater, not fewer, job prospects.
Speaking of which: to the more than dozen of you who have offered me jobs as a result of my recent/. posts, deepest thanks.
Unfortunately, I must be an anonymous coward as I have worked under Doug and in a position where if I went public, could make my life a difficult one. Doug's crew (not necessarily himself, but I wouldn't doubt it) has a history of sexual harassment cases. I find it interesting that Doug's former boss is now also getting similar accusations. If you want to work with a bunch of "good old boys", work for Linuxcare!
Last May, when Fernand was new on the job, he DID fire the then-reigning IT manager in part for allegations of discrimination (including racist and sexist remarks). So I know Fernand can do what's best for the company despite any human, personal failings.
Also, just because someone has an affair doesn't mean that they are creating a hostile working environment for others. To me, they're much different kettles of fish and the hostile working environment is much worse on the scale of things.
That said, I've heard numerous reports of a hostile working environment for women under the current CIO and staff. Stuff like:
Standing behind a woman while she was leaning over a phone and plugging and unplugging the connection behind her, ridiculing her in front of other staff;
Creating code words for women's body parts to discuss them in meetings (yep, not all those buzzwords are technical).
However, I think we've seen enough posts from ACs who have worked at Linuxcare or who are still working there stating that the current working environment in IT is hostile to anyone, not just women. But the AC's last line is quite true. I hate to say I told them so last fall, but I did. It's just worse than even I surmised.
And, all this is known about and there are NO intentions to fix it. That much is very clear from the Linuxcare press release the other day.
If you had any management experience you would know that the person at the top sets the standards and boundaries for an entire organization.
Is this an explanation for why so many IT managers were sexist, racist and homophobic? Otherwise, I don't get your point.
The reason LC IT got off to such a bad start is they had a system admin team who essentially wanted to be paid to sit on their butts all day bantering with each other online. Any attempt to squeeze any real productive work was met with cries of foul and BS community posturing. The attitude seemed to be - if I am rude enough to people they will stop asking me for things. Much like their behavior on local LUG mailing lists.
Funny, most of the LC sysadmin team stayed (I was not a member of it). And the rudest member stayed. And the one that one of the founders said was least productive is the one that is still there. Yep, you cleaned house all right. And the ones that left took higher-paying and more satisfying jobs elsewhere. The characterization of them sitting on their butts was spin control. At one point, IT was a very tightly meshed group, but management found that a threat.
What would your position be if DN and minions were the next scapegoats on the list? Would anything but the public eviceration of the board and founders meet with your approval? Lots of complaints but no solutions.
The reality of VC is this: when the VCs start managing the day-to-day aspects of the business, its days are numbered. They want to get their money out. It's going to be a quick IPO, damn the morale in IT. But not for YOU. Not for YOUR BENEFIT (or mine, as I am a shareholder). The point, as it has become obvious, is NOT to build a company, but rather to eviscerate one. Linuxcare has been turned down for purchase by other companies. VA snubbed Linuxcare and bought Andover for about the same amount of money. If I worked at Linuxcare and knew that, I would feel insulted. Of course, likely the staff weren't told that. It would be bad for morale.
And why should VA or Red Hat, which have viable management structures and revenue streams in place, want to pay that much money for Linuxcare? In another few months all those geeks will be on the market and Red Hat and VA have correctly figured that they will probably still want to work in Linux companies. Why pay today when you can have it for free tomorrow?
The point, in case you missed it, was probably best stated by a friend of mine, who said that Linuxcare, never having a viable business model other than "go IPO," was really nothing more than LinuxOne with some people (the geeks) who were sincerely trying.
To get back to your question, the only way it has a prayer is a) slowing growth (because growth is expensive) and b) cutting costs.
Ghods, I do so love spin doctoring. This sounds more like a piece from one of Linuxcare's current management than from an ex-employee. I'll take these slightly out of order:
He [DN, the CIO] did build one giant infrastructure-perhaps that investment will pay off when the company scales.
Please do yourself a favor and take corporate finance. Until you do, here's the rule of thumb you learn on the first day of class: What kills a business in the short term is cash flow, what kills a business in the long term is capital budgeting (i.e. long-term assets).
Any investment needs to return, in cold hard cash, the amount invested plus the cost of capital (which, in this case, includes the expected return on investment for the venture capitalists, which is NOT SMALL). In other words, the $5M they've pissed away on Sorcerer (I've heard it's more than that, but I'll be charitable) is something where if they don't actually make, over less than two years, $25M from it, they will be making a losing investment.
If it won't pay off until the company scales, re-evaluate the project when the company scales. Invest the money now in something that will have a quicker return if possible. Linuxcare has an immense staff for it not to have "scaled."
Another point of any investment is that it reduces one's choices of other investments. In other words, given the revenues they had, they'd probably have been much, much, much better spending the money in acquiring more sales staff or increasing the efficiency of the sales staff they have.
The CEO was a sharp mind, but extremely poor manager and brought all the old bad IBM stuff with him. He brought in the CIO sight unseen because of his paper credentials.
Actually, that's not true (about the sight unseen). As far as the management goes, he was brought in by the board, who had a long, hard look at his past. Evidently, they felt he was an appropriate match.
The ex-CEO got nailed before for revenue recognition issues and as a result Linuxcare has been crawling with auditors since day one.
Everyone who files for an IPO is crawling with auditors. The prior history of Fernand was common knowledge when he was hired. Yet, the management hired him anyway to legitimize their IPO. That's how it was spindoctored when he was hired. So amusing to see it go the other way later. "Oh, we didn't know." Yeah right.
So, should talking to an auditor be a firing offense? Because one of Linuxcare's IT staff was fired for apparently that. Which brings up the interesting question of what she could possibly have said that might have made that much of a difference...unless it involved things like, oh, employee emails being sniffed by the IT staff, or things that might actually get a company in a great deal of legal hot water. Or perhaps she was talking about the numerous reports of racist, sexist and (in San Francisco!) homophobic remarks from current IT management, leading the auditors to believe that the employee relations were, um, weak.
I am told that the internal morale situation is on a real upswing.
That's the beauty of scapegoating -- you can temporarily improve morale by getting rid of one person and spindoctoring it so that people who don't know better believe it. And geeks, being generally naive about people, unfortunately tend to.
Over the years, the LC founders have shown that when things get in the shit, they'll do whatever it takes to fix the situation.
You mean over ONE year, don't you? The company hasn't been around more than a year. Its formal introduction to the world was 13 months ago at Linuxworld. As for the sentiment, there was a time when I believed that and got burned by my faith.
I think Linuxcare has a chance, but not given the course they've apparently chosen to take. The next round of scapegoating will likely be the last.
PS - "fix the situation" in this case means "get the investors their money back as quickly as possible" - quite possibly to the detriment of other stockholders, such as the Linux geeks that are the pillars of the organization.
The previous IT manager was a good guy. I liked him. I felt he had gotten screwed.
I won't deny that there were things I liked about SM, but I don't feel he got screwed[1]. And, you have to admit that, since you were his favorite employee (hand-picked and all), you have a different perspective. Just as RonBob and BobRon (as we called the pair underneath the CIO, having initial trouble telling them apart) have about the current CIO.
I know how other people fought to have basic respect for their jobs and themselves.
[1] He had a long history of short stints as a manager -- 3 to 6 months, so pretty clearly he'd run into these same issues before. He's also been, just from people I know, at at least two places since. I remember hearing Talin saying that he'd left a position not too long ago.
I spent a 5 week period at Linuxcare this year. What I saw there was pretty ill. It was a rats nest of clueless managers slinging NT laptops spending money as fast they could. The CIO was a greyman drone who created a police state atmosphere where people were afraid to point out the insane path the company was on. I am very happy to have cut my losses and got out quick. There were many smart people in SF but nothing could make up for the inhuman working conditions and venomous politics. I am happy to be out.
When I was fired, after some panic from upper management, I was given three options: Come back and work under the CIO; Resign; or Remain fired.
I pointed out that I couldn't, in good conscience, work under the CIO (I had offered to work under another group, such as the one Art Tyde had headed at the time). The CIO had a plan and none of us who were there were a part of that plan. Resigning had negative financial consequences (I wasn't going to pay money to leave, especially since I would have preferred to stay working there) and I considered it an after-the-fact misrepresentation of what happened. So I accepted being fired.
But working at Linuxcare before that was so different: there were problems, but not venomous politics OR inhuman working conditions.
There were people using Windows (and MacOS), but most people used Linux. People used what they had to to get the job done. A lot of people, for reasons that should be obvious, needed compatibility with documents like Office 2000 in order to get contracts hashed out, etc. Office 2000 document compatibility isn't really available on Linux yet (last I checked).
I needed a good drawing program and the best one for my purposes ran on MacOS X Server (Glyphix rocks!). So one day, Linus Torvalds walks by my desk and peers at the screen. I felt about 6 inches tall at the time.
But as far as your characterization of what it was like under the CIO, I couldn't put it in better words myself. I know people working there who were just ducking their heads down, marking time until the IPO. That's not the kind of attitude that makes a company a good place to work.
Linux, after all, is the ultimate skunkworks project. Management that respects and fosters the skunkworks model would clearly be an advantage at a Linux firm.
Very much agreed. When he first showed up, I thought, "this guy's been at IBM for 20 years. He's never gonna fit in." At one of the first company meetings, he fired someone with a nerf gun for running on too long. At that point, I realized that it might work after all. And I think he really did take a bunch of geeks and form a real organization.
Since the announcement's been made about the Office of the CEO replacing the position of CEO, I will say that I think Pat Lambs is awesome. I remember her from the brown-bag luncheons.
I left about a month before Nasuer started. But Linuxcares IT infrastructure when I was there, had all the physical pieces in my opinion. It just needed a good orchestrator.
Linuxcare's IT infrastructure at that time consisted of a handful of people and not a whole lot of equipment. I think with a good overall manager who was somewhat budget-conscious, they would have done very very well with about double the staff. As I'm sure you know, they needed more desktop support and some direction.
On the other hand starting with a certain VP of engineering, linuxcare had a habit of screwing good people. (don't read into this to much, I was not one of them.)
I knew you weren't Roger.:) But yes, the prior IT manager was a nightmare. Two for two.
Btw, glad to see you're doing well. We hadn't heard a peep from you after you left. And yes, I did figure out who you are.:)
I don't think that a valid effort has been done on the part of wall street to understand linux really, and for that matter linux companies should be doing a -much- better job of educating our finance folks in New York and elsewheree on why it's a better choice and is a good buy on the market.
One of the things I managed to do this semester was take some finance classes, including one on options trading. I didn't realize how much of it was people-intensive and how much of the stock market is simply attention span. I happened to have the luck to have Paul Lane, an Order Book Official for the Pacific Options Exchange, as the instructor. In that class, we got to know what it was really like as a business from the inside. I heartily recommend it (it's offered through Berkeley extension) to anyone who has to do investor relations. Really an eye-opener.
The people in the market are mostly sheep, even the market makers. The market makers go where the action is. If there's a lot happening at one station on the floor, that's where they'll be. They make their money on the spread, so they care a lot about volume. And they have to be really aggressive.
So, while the education campaign would probably help, it's still a business where a large chunk of the movers and shakers have VERY short attention spans and try and cover or close their positions within the day where possible, within the week if not. Institutional investors tend to have longer attention spans. Individual investors are the group most subject to panic. Unfortunately, a lot of the Linux investors have likely been individuals. A lot of people were buying Linux because Microsoft's future looked bleak. But not bleak enough apparently.
I don't know that, having been fired from Linuxcare, being turned down by a company while job hunting is "get around a lot." The turndown was based on my resume, not an interview, so apparently they believed I wasn't a fit. As it happens, I had already accepted another position, where I'm currently working.
I was an early employee of Linuxcare, fired by Nassaur last November. I think others can now see why I consider this a peculiar sort of honor.
I hadn't suspected that the CEO was on the way out, but I knew that the CIO was likely to be. His very expensive infrastructure was completely inappropriate (and unnecessary) for a Linux services firm, and all the geeks knew it at that time. Instead of focusing on Linux, he focused on expensive, proprietary software and ridiculous hardware implementations. It was the geek equivalent of buying a Lamborghini when you really needed a Honda.
This is the main part where the article erred -- Sorcerer wasn't the "heart" of the business at all. Nassaur *wanted* it to be. Of course, he would go into a company, spend a bajillion dollars and be out in a year (read the S1/A for his history if you don't think so...). What did he care? He had his equity and his high salary and was out of there.
What Linuxcare desperately needs, if it is to survive, is a CEO & CIO who care about the Linux space AND about actually building a Linux services firm that serves its customers, not a few people at the top. My resume is in the mail.:)
I'm sure, given appropriate people, that Linuxcare can be a much better company after this. My heart goes out to all my friends there after this shocking blow.
One of the first things I learned as a widow is that there are more people than you think who will kick you when you're down. It's a sad thing to have to learn.
I don't think the comments reflect especially ill of the slashdot community; rather, they are a reflection of the human tendency toward inhumanity.
We as people rarely see this inhumanity, so it seems surprising to us. All I can say is: this is the warning shot, don't be surprised when you're grieving and you are on the receiving end yourself.
Better to know it exists and be prepared for it than be blindsided like I was.
Slashdot Mirror
Natalie Portman.
_Deirdre
Why, for the same reason we all buy DVDs: the extra stuff. The better sound. The ability to hit mute and/or next scene whenever Jar Jar hits the screen.
While Rick didn't see TPM more than once, I did. I liked the movie, but it was not designed to stand alone the way A New Hope was. It's act 1 of a longer story. Empire is still my favorite and I'd buy that on DVD too -- along with the other two. I own the three on video now, but I prefer LaserDisc and DVD formats.
_Deirdre
Lucas should release it while I still own a DVD player.
Ah well, back to watching Cube again I guess....
_Deirdre
They had a bunch of changes to the Objective-C compiler that were necessary but never rolled in to gcc's main distro. Afaik, they never hid them. They are now a part of the Darwin project last I checked.
_Deirdre
In most cases, as source is closed, that's not an issue. That aside, in most states, one can't sue unless one has demonstrated that one has *tried* to settle differences without a lawsuit and been unsuccessful.
In other words, there's the warning shot across the bow before the courts. Let's see a warning shot across the bow -- IN PRIVATE PLEASE -- before convicting someone in a court of public opinion.
_Deirdre
There IS a submission credit: Bruce Perens. It's in the same style as everything else today:
Bruce Perens writes....
david-currie writes....
Sander Sassen writes....
I didn't just pull it out of my hat. :)
Plus, there's the "We've" in the item that clearly indicates it was Bruce writing.
_Deirdre
Bingo. A lot of the Be folk are just as much friends of open source as anyone. The choice to work at a proprietary OS company is something that I *can* understand, even if Bruce and RMS can't. Be's offices have a vitality and energy (not to mention a whole bunch of old hardware) that I haven't seen often.
I don't see why Bruce had to draw attention to what he already believes is a simple, honest mistake. It would have been more professional to deal with it privately and only make it a community issue if Be ignored him or refused to fix the problem.
I agree. I doubt they would have ignored him or refused to fix the problem, but I'd be willing to bet that they may re-engineer it not to use his code.
_Deirdre
You will note, if you look that every single other item in the gnu/r5 tree (see? they knew and they were acting clued) has source. I looked quickly, but it does seem that this was an oversight.
It certainly didn't need to be shouted this loudly. Did Bruce actually contact them privately first or did he just yell to the media?
A single omission does not a clueless company make.
No one screamed this loud when Linuxcare's Bootable Business Card was distributed without source (this omission was corrected, but there was a period of several weeks when it was an issue). When I handed one to RMS, he was polite but firm about it (as he should be), but he didn't post it to a web page and submit it to Slashdot.
_Deirdre
You can check here. (http://skull.of.lron.org/) Note the nifty pic by my mom at the bottom of the page.
The page URL *used* to be http://fuck.the.skull.of.lron.org/ but I see Iain has "toned down" his DNS entries. Ah well.
_Deirdre
"Of course 90% of science fiction is crap. 90% of everything is crap. And half the rest of the time, you had no right to expect that much."
I'm quite ready to believe that Battlefield Earth: The Movie falls into the last category. ;)
_Deirdre
Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman are apparently out of scientology. At least, it's fairly apparent from her interviews over the last year that she is. They deflect questions about scientology that they hadn't in the past. _Deirdre
Travolta was shopping around for a production company last year and I was in Culver City. I opened the door to the hallway from the office I was in (formerly a soundstage) and there was John Travolta wandering over to the neighboring production studio trying to pitch his movie. In the three feet he crossed while I looked at him, numerous emotions rippled across his face. Honestly, it looked like the guy was severely mentally unstable AND possessed by multiple malicious spirits. And I don't mean scary in the way that Terl is supposed to be scary, but unstable scary. He did not look like someone one wanted to know. Other people in the office were kind of in awe about Travolta, but I just can't see it. I don't even think he's that great an actor. My one regret, given that the movie's finally coming out in an election year, is that I've misplaced the "Terl for President" buttons I got from the 1984 World Science Fiction con. Grr. _Deirdre
What has thus far been missed at Linuxcare is the unique fragility of employer-employee relationships for open source developers. Normally, programmers don't want to leave cool projects because they're fun to work on. In open source, the projects go with them -- witness the migration of Raster and Mandrake last year.
Therefore, a company saying "we can pay you to do Cool Stuff" doesn't have the same hold. They can do the SAME Cool Stuff in any of several companies. Thus, if one has politics that suck, well, there's other fish in the sea. And they may well get better pay and meaningful stock options elsewhere too.
And, given that the various Linux companies' stock prices are depressed, it's a great time to move (stock options will be cheaper...). Better to spend time vesting at an already successful company than a wannabe that is spending itself into oblivion.
Of course, what's true for the open source developers is also true for others in the company, but with different skill sets, one expects they might land in different directions and have greater, not fewer, job prospects.
Speaking of which: to the more than dozen of you who have offered me jobs as a result of my recent /. posts, deepest thanks.
_Deirdre
Last May, when Fernand was new on the job, he DID fire the then-reigning IT manager in part for allegations of discrimination (including racist and sexist remarks). So I know Fernand can do what's best for the company despite any human, personal failings.
Also, just because someone has an affair doesn't mean that they are creating a hostile working environment for others. To me, they're much different kettles of fish and the hostile working environment is much worse on the scale of things.
That said, I've heard numerous reports of a hostile working environment for women under the current CIO and staff. Stuff like:
However, I think we've seen enough posts from ACs who have worked at Linuxcare or who are still working there stating that the current working environment in IT is hostile to anyone, not just women. But the AC's last line is quite true. I hate to say I told them so last fall, but I did. It's just worse than even I surmised.
And, all this is known about and there are NO intentions to fix it. That much is very clear from the Linuxcare press release the other day.
_Deirdre
Of course it is.
If you had any management experience you would know that the person at the top sets the standards and boundaries for an entire organization.
Is this an explanation for why so many IT managers were sexist, racist and homophobic? Otherwise, I don't get your point.
The reason LC IT got off to such a bad start is they had a system admin team who essentially wanted to be paid to sit on their butts all day bantering with each other online. Any attempt to squeeze any real productive work was met with cries of foul and BS community posturing. The attitude seemed to be - if I am rude enough to people they will stop asking me for things. Much like their behavior on local LUG mailing lists.
Funny, most of the LC sysadmin team stayed (I was not a member of it). And the rudest member stayed. And the one that one of the founders said was least productive is the one that is still there. Yep, you cleaned house all right. And the ones that left took higher-paying and more satisfying jobs elsewhere. The characterization of them sitting on their butts was spin control. At one point, IT was a very tightly meshed group, but management found that a threat.
What would your position be if DN and minions were the next scapegoats on the list? Would anything but the public eviceration of the board and founders meet with your approval? Lots of complaints but no solutions.
The reality of VC is this: when the VCs start managing the day-to-day aspects of the business, its days are numbered. They want to get their money out. It's going to be a quick IPO, damn the morale in IT. But not for YOU. Not for YOUR BENEFIT (or mine, as I am a shareholder). The point, as it has become obvious, is NOT to build a company, but rather to eviscerate one. Linuxcare has been turned down for purchase by other companies. VA snubbed Linuxcare and bought Andover for about the same amount of money. If I worked at Linuxcare and knew that, I would feel insulted. Of course, likely the staff weren't told that. It would be bad for morale.
And why should VA or Red Hat, which have viable management structures and revenue streams in place, want to pay that much money for Linuxcare? In another few months all those geeks will be on the market and Red Hat and VA have correctly figured that they will probably still want to work in Linux companies. Why pay today when you can have it for free tomorrow?
The point, in case you missed it, was probably best stated by a friend of mine, who said that Linuxcare, never having a viable business model other than "go IPO," was really nothing more than LinuxOne with some people (the geeks) who were sincerely trying.
To get back to your question, the only way it has a prayer is a) slowing growth (because growth is expensive) and b) cutting costs.
_Deirdre
He [DN, the CIO] did build one giant infrastructure-perhaps that investment will pay off when the company scales.
Please do yourself a favor and take corporate finance. Until you do, here's the rule of thumb you learn on the first day of class: What kills a business in the short term is cash flow, what kills a business in the long term is capital budgeting (i.e. long-term assets).
Any investment needs to return, in cold hard cash, the amount invested plus the cost of capital (which, in this case, includes the expected return on investment for the venture capitalists, which is NOT SMALL). In other words, the $5M they've pissed away on Sorcerer (I've heard it's more than that, but I'll be charitable) is something where if they don't actually make, over less than two years, $25M from it, they will be making a losing investment.
If it won't pay off until the company scales, re-evaluate the project when the company scales. Invest the money now in something that will have a quicker return if possible. Linuxcare has an immense staff for it not to have "scaled."
Another point of any investment is that it reduces one's choices of other investments. In other words, given the revenues they had, they'd probably have been much, much, much better spending the money in acquiring more sales staff or increasing the efficiency of the sales staff they have.
The CEO was a sharp mind, but extremely poor manager and brought all the old bad IBM stuff with him. He brought in the CIO sight unseen because of his paper credentials.
Actually, that's not true (about the sight unseen). As far as the management goes, he was brought in by the board, who had a long, hard look at his past. Evidently, they felt he was an appropriate match.
The ex-CEO got nailed before for revenue recognition issues and as a result Linuxcare has been crawling with auditors since day one.
Everyone who files for an IPO is crawling with auditors. The prior history of Fernand was common knowledge when he was hired. Yet, the management hired him anyway to legitimize their IPO. That's how it was spindoctored when he was hired. So amusing to see it go the other way later. "Oh, we didn't know." Yeah right.
So, should talking to an auditor be a firing offense? Because one of Linuxcare's IT staff was fired for apparently that. Which brings up the interesting question of what she could possibly have said that might have made that much of a difference...unless it involved things like, oh, employee emails being sniffed by the IT staff, or things that might actually get a company in a great deal of legal hot water. Or perhaps she was talking about the numerous reports of racist, sexist and (in San Francisco!) homophobic remarks from current IT management, leading the auditors to believe that the employee relations were, um, weak.
I am told that the internal morale situation is on a real upswing.
That's the beauty of scapegoating -- you can temporarily improve morale by getting rid of one person and spindoctoring it so that people who don't know better believe it. And geeks, being generally naive about people, unfortunately tend to.
Over the years, the LC founders have shown that when things get in the shit, they'll do whatever it takes to fix the situation.
You mean over ONE year, don't you? The company hasn't been around more than a year. Its formal introduction to the world was 13 months ago at Linuxworld. As for the sentiment, there was a time when I believed that and got burned by my faith.
I think Linuxcare has a chance, but not given the course they've apparently chosen to take. The next round of scapegoating will likely be the last.
PS - "fix the situation" in this case means "get the investors their money back as quickly as possible" - quite possibly to the detriment of other stockholders, such as the Linux geeks that are the pillars of the organization.
_Deirdre
Bowie, give it a rest, OK?
It's over. Done with. History. Move along.
_Deirdre
I won't deny that there were things I liked about SM, but I don't feel he got screwed[1]. And, you have to admit that, since you were his favorite employee (hand-picked and all), you have a different perspective. Just as RonBob and BobRon (as we called the pair underneath the CIO, having initial trouble telling them apart) have about the current CIO.
I know how other people fought to have basic respect for their jobs and themselves.
[1] He had a long history of short stints as a manager -- 3 to 6 months, so pretty clearly he'd run into these same issues before. He's also been, just from people I know, at at least two places since. I remember hearing Talin saying that he'd left a position not too long ago.
_Deirdre
When I was fired, after some panic from upper management, I was given three options: Come back and work under the CIO; Resign; or Remain fired.
I pointed out that I couldn't, in good conscience, work under the CIO (I had offered to work under another group, such as the one Art Tyde had headed at the time). The CIO had a plan and none of us who were there were a part of that plan. Resigning had negative financial consequences (I wasn't going to pay money to leave, especially since I would have preferred to stay working there) and I considered it an after-the-fact misrepresentation of what happened. So I accepted being fired.
But working at Linuxcare before that was so different: there were problems, but not venomous politics OR inhuman working conditions.
There were people using Windows (and MacOS), but most people used Linux. People used what they had to to get the job done. A lot of people, for reasons that should be obvious, needed compatibility with documents like Office 2000 in order to get contracts hashed out, etc. Office 2000 document compatibility isn't really available on Linux yet (last I checked).
I needed a good drawing program and the best one for my purposes ran on MacOS X Server (Glyphix rocks!). So one day, Linus Torvalds walks by my desk and peers at the screen. I felt about 6 inches tall at the time.
But as far as your characterization of what it was like under the CIO, I couldn't put it in better words myself. I know people working there who were just ducking their heads down, marking time until the IPO. That's not the kind of attitude that makes a company a good place to work.
Linux, after all, is the ultimate skunkworks project. Management that respects and fosters the skunkworks model would clearly be an advantage at a Linux firm.
_Deirdre
Very much agreed. When he first showed up, I thought, "this guy's been at IBM for 20 years. He's never gonna fit in." At one of the first company meetings, he fired someone with a nerf gun for running on too long. At that point, I realized that it might work after all. And I think he really did take a bunch of geeks and form a real organization.
Since the announcement's been made about the Office of the CEO replacing the position of CEO, I will say that I think Pat Lambs is awesome. I remember her from the brown-bag luncheons.
I left about a month before Nasuer started. But Linuxcares IT infrastructure when I was there, had all the physical pieces in my opinion. It just needed a good orchestrator.
Linuxcare's IT infrastructure at that time consisted of a handful of people and not a whole lot of equipment. I think with a good overall manager who was somewhat budget-conscious, they would have done very very well with about double the staff. As I'm sure you know, they needed more desktop support and some direction.
On the other hand starting with a certain VP of engineering, linuxcare had a habit of screwing good people. (don't read into this to much, I was not one of them.)
I knew you weren't Roger. :) But yes, the prior IT manager was a nightmare. Two for two.
Btw, glad to see you're doing well. We hadn't heard a peep from you after you left. And yes, I did figure out who you are. :)
_Deirdre
The people in the market are mostly sheep, even the market makers. The market makers go where the action is. If there's a lot happening at one station on the floor, that's where they'll be. They make their money on the spread, so they care a lot about volume. And they have to be really aggressive.
So, while the education campaign would probably help, it's still a business where a large chunk of the movers and shakers have VERY short attention spans and try and cover or close their positions within the day where possible, within the week if not. Institutional investors tend to have longer attention spans. Individual investors are the group most subject to panic. Unfortunately, a lot of the Linux investors have likely been individuals. A lot of people were buying Linux because Microsoft's future looked bleak. But not bleak enough apparently.
_Deirdre
I don't know that, having been fired from Linuxcare, being turned down by a company while job hunting is "get around a lot." The turndown was based on my resume, not an interview, so apparently they believed I wasn't a fit. As it happens, I had already accepted another position, where I'm currently working.
I was an early employee of Linuxcare, fired by Nassaur last November. I think others can now see why I consider this a peculiar sort of honor.
:)
I hadn't suspected that the CEO was on the way out, but I knew that the CIO was likely to be. His very expensive infrastructure was completely inappropriate (and unnecessary) for a Linux services firm, and all the geeks knew it at that time. Instead of focusing on Linux, he focused on expensive, proprietary software and ridiculous hardware implementations. It was the geek equivalent of buying a Lamborghini when you really needed a Honda.
This is the main part where the article erred -- Sorcerer wasn't the "heart" of the business at all. Nassaur *wanted* it to be. Of course, he would go into a company, spend a bajillion dollars and be out in a year (read the S1/A for his history if you don't think so...). What did he care? He had his equity and his high salary and was out of there.
What Linuxcare desperately needs, if it is to survive, is a CEO & CIO who care about the Linux space AND about actually building a Linux services firm that serves its customers, not a few people at the top. My resume is in the mail.
I'm sure, given appropriate people, that Linuxcare can be a much better company after this. My heart goes out to all my friends there after this shocking blow.
Breathe deep folks,
_Deirdre
One of the first things I learned as a widow is that there are more people than you think who will kick you when you're down. It's a sad thing to have to learn.
I don't think the comments reflect especially ill of the slashdot community; rather, they are a reflection of the human tendency toward inhumanity.
We as people rarely see this inhumanity, so it seems surprising to us. All I can say is: this is the warning shot, don't be surprised when you're grieving and you are on the receiving end yourself.
Better to know it exists and be prepared for it than be blindsided like I was.
_Deirdre