Whether Red Hat was profitable prior to their IPO isn't really relevant to this discussion. Most companies get financing in order to fund new products or buy other companies. When you start a new product, you spend a lot of money, but in return you develop assets which have book value. Red Hat doesn't have tangible assets because they don't own the software they produce.
Red Hat spent most of their money on sales and marketing. S&M basically erased their entire profit margin. So this suggests that they are either selling their products too cheaply or they are really bad at S&M. But they probably can't sell them for any more money because they are still selling something that you can get for free. I don't see them making in the 100s of millions any time soon.
There is no legislation regarding royalties for internet broadcasts of television in Canada. What you are implying is that in spite of written legislation dictating conditional rights to rebroadcast transmissions, there is some implied consent to pay royalties for compliant broadcasts across the internet medium specifically because it is the internet medium.
We don't have a lot of information to go on here. One of the links provided by the OP (which seemed non-authoritative) discussed whether iCrave should pay syndication fees rather than royalties.
You are not generally required by law to keep user logs. Poor recordkeeping is not illegal.
That is something that traditionally varies by industry. Ask a pawn shop owner what happens if they don't keep good records.
ISPs provide a service that can facilitate criminal activities. The courts will almost certainly rule that they are required to keep some records, especially DHCP logs, which they would very likely want to keep anyway (for debugging purposes or for monitoring spam, DoS, and other abuses).
IBM is such a big company that it is impossible to look at their financial reports and figure out How much of their revenue comes from Linux consulting. Additionally, IBM invented FUD and they are excellent snake oil salesmen.
IBM is still a different category from Red Hat, though. I don't see them developing OSS products. They just target Linux as the OS.
Had Corel made a native version of WP 9.0 and released the WordProcessor as free download (and the suite for pay) they'd have cornered the market cause nothing else was as advanced (and well-known as WordPerfect, mind you) at that time. They blew it and all by themselves!
Every time an OSS company goes bankrupt, some/. apologist points out the exact mistake they made that deep-sixed the product. Well, guess what... nobody's perfect. Every company makes mistakes, but the successful ones manage to recover. If your business case is so fragile that a single mistake will kill your product then you've got a shitty business case.
Stop keeping logs of users. Just issue DHCP at random and be done with it.
Willful ignorance is not a defense to the law. (Remember Napster tried to claim that they were merely providing a file swapping service and they didn't monitor which files people were trading.)
It's a step. They've been making money above the line for the last year, but suffering a net loss. This is their first net profit, but quarterly earnings are BS. They made a $300k profit... big deal.
Let me know when they:
1. Make an annual profit. 2. Recover the $140 million they lost last year. 3. Recover the $279 million they have lost total. 4. Provide a fair return on the $600 million or so that has been invested in them over the years.
What's embarassing is that Red Hat is the most successful OSS company out there and they still can't make a profit. What you don't seem to understand about starting a business is that the reward has to compensate for the risk involved. Maybe Red Hat will make a profit someday, but I doubt they'll ever make billions.
You see, to vindicate a business model it is not enough to show that it worked once. For every financially successful OSS product there will be 10 failures. If the best a successful OSS company can hope to earn is a couple of hundred million (in an industry where the previous market leader was making billions) then the risk is quite simply not worth the reward.
Obviously Red Hat and SuSE have to make money... After being in business for years, surely these guys know a thing or two about how to stay afloat.
Yeah... do a massive public offering when your stock is overvalued, stick the money in the bank, and then slowly bleed to death while you wait for the economy to recover. That's Red Hat at least.
I dunno about SuSE; they're a privately held company so they don't release revenue figures. They don't have any jobs posted on their website though.
1) I don't see that there's any reason to base a business purely on open source. You can write proprietary software AND open source software (e.g. modifications to open software you interact with).
So far it hasn't been easy to do that. Look at Sun and Corel and their efforts to sell Linux-based office suites. It's largely an issue of demographics. Linux users have proven to be a poor customer base because it's hard to sell to users who are already used to getting everything for free. There is also the inherent problem that as soon as you develop a popular app, someone is going to make a free alternative and you won't be able to compete. 2) Even if for some ideological reason you choose to write open source software only, you can do it on a fee for service basis (e.g. other people who need custom modifications but don't have the wherewithal).
I think you vastly over-estimate the market for customized software. End users aren't going to pay for stuff like this, so you immediately eliminate a big chunk of your customer base. I'm not saying some businesses won't want it, but they aren't going to pay an arm and a leg for some silly feature if the free version works almost as well. And you neglect the oft overlooked fact that developing a GPL'ed feature gives them zero advantage if their competitors use the same software.
-a
Re:New addition for next revision:
on
F'd Companies
·
· Score: 1
From the website:
Man Proving that giving away free software is not the road to profitability, French Linux distributor Mandrake filed for their equivalent of chapter 11. When: 1/17/2003 Company: Mandrakesoft Severity: 100 - new hall of fame inductee! Points: 200 35 comments in the Happy Fun Slander Corner!
The OP seemed to think that Canadians had the unfettered right to rebroadcast TV. That is clearly not true. Exceptions which apply to remote areas are unlikely to apply to the Internet, unless you can restrict access to the site to remote areas.
No. Time is required by the government to publish a Canadian edition with a minimum percentage of Canadian content. There may be some kind of minimum circulation requirement before these laws kick in.
I don't have any links. The OP said so many things that were obviously wrong that I had no reason to believe his last statement.
Your links imply that there is such a right, but they are not authoritative and they are vague about the conditions. What I get out of these pages is:
that under certain [unspecificed] conditions, it is okay to rebroadcast a "public" TV station [no definition given] as long as the signal is unmodified and the copyright owners are compensated.
What the OP didn't mention (and probably didn't realize) is that you still have to pay separate royalties/syndication fees for the Internet. That's all I was really saying anyway.
The problem is that every government always thinks they have all the answers and invariably they don't. In Ontario we always get logic like:
"These two hospitals are costing us $30 million a year, but if we merge them into a single hospital, it will only cost $25 million a year. Merging them will cost $30 million and the process will take 2 years, so the project will break even after 8 years."
That argument makes sense on a superficial level, but if you take those odds you have got to be crazy. *Assuming* that you estimated everything perfectly and that circumstances don't change in the next 8 years and that the next government doesn't cancel the program, what you have gained is absolute peanuts compared to the risk you take.
Therefore, I prefer governments that hem and haw and don't do anything drastice unless they absolutely have to.
I'm sure that South Africa is doing what's best for South Africa, but I hope they're not doing it just to say "why not". They did what everybody wishes their respective governments would do: take a year to think about things, and then take decisive action
I'm sure I'm in the minority here, but I actually prefer indecisive government to decisive government. Decisive govenments tend to spend wads of money on untested programs that are then cancelled by the next government.
You have to love it when governments take a "why not" approach to innovation. It's something a lot of USA busineses (and government entities) could take a lesson from.
Uhh... pardon my asking, but do you have a short memory? Isn't a "why not" approach to innovation exactly what caused the tech bubble? "So you want me to invest $50 million in a company to produce a website for transvestite kamakaze circus clowns? And they want to buy a Superbowl ad? Hmmm... Why not?"
It appears that, in general, South Africa has leapt way ahead of the US in a large number of policy areas, not just Open Source. They've got fundamental protections in their constitutions which are significantly stronger than those in the US (for example, you can't discriminate based on percieved sexuality, domestic partnerships are law, with same sex marriages in the works, etc.)
90% of the Western world is ahead of the US on social issues like this. South Africa may have been the longest hold out in the segregation battle, but the US isn't far behind. What other Western country is ruled by a powerful religious lobby?
FYI, it is legal in Canada to rebroadcast television channels so long as it is not modified. (I don't recall any stipulations to that) There are special exceptions to the non-modification clause in that Canadian channels are permitted to play localized advertising over foreign content, as long as the same program is played. For example, we never see U.S. Superbowl commercials. We get the same game. But Canadian commercials.
I don't think you understand. When Global broadcasts the Superbowl in Canada it is because they have paid money to the NFL for the Canadian rights. Otherwise, don't you think every single Canadian network would show it?
There is also a rule that if a Canadian channel and an American channel are showing the same thing at the same time, the American channel has to use the Canadian feed. So if you watch the Simpsons on Sunday, you will see the same (Canadian) commercials whether you watch it on Fox or Global. But still, this is because Global has paid for the Canadian rights to the Simpsons.
There is no also right to rebroadcast TV channels unmodified. Honestly, I think you just made that up. The cable and satelite companies have to pay money for the channels they offer. That's why your bill went up when they increased the number of available channels. These channels can't survive by advertising alone, so rebroadcasting them would seriously damage their earnings potential.
The real issue is whether the constraints on free speech are for a reasonable purpose and for a limited time.
There are plenty of valid constraints on free speech that are not time-limited. If a country passes a law forbiding websites from publishing the addresses of abortion doctors, that would be reasonable, and it doesn't have to be time-limited.
Canadian law already requires that all magazines that are sold in Canada be published as special editions (which contain a certain amount of Canadian content). I'm sure that the Canadian government is already eager to impose similar restrictions on the Internet. Filtering out sites that contravene Canadian law would be just another step in this process. A much more serious problem is when politicians use national laws to try to suppress stories that embarass them. This is currently the case with the German Chancellor who has obtained an injunction in the German courts to prevent the Mail on Sunday from publishing allegations of adultery with a television reporter.
Of course, the real test is not that he is trying, but whether or not he succeeds. From the looks of things, he won't. Unless of course, the Mail is also sold in Germany, in which case they might be forced to publish a separate edition. That is one reason I like Google news so much, you can compare side by side the US reports of an event with the local reports. You won't find a report of the arms embargo that Britain has imposed against Israel in the US press, but you can find it in the UK and Israeli press.
That is indeed an interesting tidbit. Of course, I tend to wonder whether this is the effect of deliberate bias or whether the American public is simply too isolationist to care. And of course, deliberate censorship is still a more difficult technical issue than simply not reporting something.
It may not be the popular opinion here, but the Internet is going to have to evolve to respect the laws of sovereign nations. The Canadian law is a perfectly reasonable one; this isn't another example of Chinese censorship
Perhaps they would have preferred that he also build in the same security mechanisms as other DVD players, but these, of course, would be easily defeated, assuming the code is open source. I guess I don't see a lot of details in the article, or I'm missing some of it. Would the prosecution suggest that any open source DVD player is illegal?
Quite possibly, yes. OSS creates a legal problem because there is often no one specific to sue and no one website to shut down. As we see on/., this is often used as justification for skirting the law.
I think that the whatever DVD player trade association there is out there would allow an OSS project to join (for the usual fee), but they would only allow selected portions of the code to be released as open source.
Slashdot Mirror
I think there's a difference between customizing existing software and using software to create customized content.
-a
Whether Red Hat was profitable prior to their IPO isn't really relevant to this discussion. Most companies get financing in order to fund new products or buy other companies. When you start a new product, you spend a lot of money, but in return you develop assets which have book value. Red Hat doesn't have tangible assets because they don't own the software they produce.
Red Hat spent most of their money on sales and marketing. S&M basically erased their entire profit margin. So this suggests that they are either selling their products too cheaply or they are really bad at S&M. But they probably can't sell them for any more money because they are still selling something that you can get for free. I don't see them making in the 100s of millions any time soon.
-a
There is no legislation regarding royalties for internet broadcasts of television in Canada. What you are implying is that in spite of written legislation dictating conditional rights to rebroadcast transmissions, there is some implied consent to pay royalties for compliant broadcasts across the internet medium specifically because it is the internet medium.
We don't have a lot of information to go on here. One of the links provided by the OP (which seemed non-authoritative) discussed whether iCrave should pay syndication fees rather than royalties.
-a
You are not generally required by law to keep user logs. Poor recordkeeping is not illegal.
That is something that traditionally varies by industry. Ask a pawn shop owner what happens if they don't keep good records.
ISPs provide a service that can facilitate criminal activities. The courts will almost certainly rule that they are required to keep some records, especially DHCP logs, which they would very likely want to keep anyway (for debugging purposes or for monitoring spam, DoS, and other abuses).
-a
IBM is such a big company that it is impossible to look at their financial reports and figure out How much of their revenue comes from Linux consulting. Additionally, IBM invented FUD and they are excellent snake oil salesmen.
IBM is still a different category from Red Hat, though. I don't see them developing OSS products. They just target Linux as the OS.
-a
Had Corel made a native version of WP 9.0 and released the WordProcessor as free download (and the suite for pay)
they'd have cornered the market cause nothing else was as advanced (and well-known as WordPerfect, mind you) at that time. They blew it and all by themselves!
Every time an OSS company goes bankrupt, some
-a
Stop keeping logs of users. Just issue DHCP at random and be done with it.
Willful ignorance is not a defense to the law. (Remember Napster tried to claim that they were merely providing a file swapping service and they didn't monitor which files people were trading.)
-a
It's a step. They've been making money above the line for the last year, but suffering a net loss. This is their first net profit, but quarterly earnings are BS. They made a $300k profit... big deal.
Let me know when they:
1. Make an annual profit.
2. Recover the $140 million they lost last year.
3. Recover the $279 million they have lost total.
4. Provide a fair return on the $600 million or so that has been invested in them over the years.
-a
What's embarassing is that Red Hat is the most successful OSS company out there and they still can't make a profit. What you don't seem to understand about starting a business is that the reward has to compensate for the risk involved. Maybe Red Hat will make a profit someday, but I doubt they'll ever make billions.
You see, to vindicate a business model it is not enough to show that it worked once. For every financially successful OSS product there will be 10 failures. If the best a successful OSS company can hope to earn is a couple of hundred million (in an industry where the previous market leader was making billions) then the risk is quite simply not worth the reward.
-a
Obviously Red Hat and SuSE have to make money... After being in business for years, surely these guys know a thing or two about how to stay afloat.
Yeah... do a massive public offering when your stock is overvalued, stick the money in the bank, and then slowly bleed to death while you wait for the economy to recover. That's Red Hat at least.
I dunno about SuSE; they're a privately held company so they don't release revenue figures. They don't have any jobs posted on their website though.
-a
Okay, fine. You're right.
/ resource/recsmags.htm.
A good explanation is at http://www.media-awareness.ca/eng/issues/cultural
-a
1) I don't see that there's any reason to base a business purely on open source. You can write proprietary software AND open source software (e.g. modifications to open software you interact with).
So far it hasn't been easy to do that. Look at Sun and Corel and their efforts to sell Linux-based office suites. It's largely an issue of demographics. Linux users have proven to be a poor customer base because it's hard to sell to users who are already used to getting everything for free. There is also the inherent problem that as soon as you develop a popular app, someone is going to make a free alternative and you won't be able to compete.
2) Even if for some ideological reason you choose to write open source software only, you can do it on a fee for service basis (e.g. other people who need custom modifications but don't have the wherewithal).
I think you vastly over-estimate the market for customized software. End users aren't going to pay for stuff like this, so you immediately eliminate a big chunk of your customer base. I'm not saying some businesses won't want it, but they aren't going to pay an arm and a leg for some silly feature if the free version works almost as well. And you neglect the oft overlooked fact that developing a GPL'ed feature gives them zero advantage if their competitors use the same software.
-a
From the website:
Man
Proving that giving away free software is not the road to profitability, French Linux distributor Mandrake filed for their equivalent of chapter 11.
When: 1/17/2003
Company: Mandrakesoft
Severity: 100 - new hall of fame inductee!
Points: 200
35 comments in the Happy Fun Slander Corner!
-a
The OP seemed to think that Canadians had the unfettered right to rebroadcast TV. That is clearly not true. Exceptions which apply to remote areas are unlikely to apply to the Internet, unless you can restrict access to the site to remote areas.
-a
No. Time is required by the government to publish a Canadian edition with a minimum percentage of Canadian content. There may be some kind of minimum circulation requirement before these laws kick in.
-a
I don't have any links. The OP said so many things that were obviously wrong that I had no reason to believe his last statement.
Your links imply that there is such a right, but they are not authoritative and they are vague about the conditions. What I get out of these pages is:
that under certain [unspecificed] conditions, it is okay to rebroadcast a "public" TV station [no definition given] as long as the signal is unmodified and the copyright owners are compensated.
What the OP didn't mention (and probably didn't realize) is that you still have to pay separate royalties/syndication fees for the Internet. That's all I was really saying anyway.
-a
The problem is that every government always thinks they have all the answers and invariably they don't. In Ontario we always get logic like:
"These two hospitals are costing us $30 million a year, but if we merge them into a single hospital, it will only cost $25 million a year. Merging them will cost $30 million and the process will take 2 years, so the project will break even after 8 years."
That argument makes sense on a superficial level, but if you take those odds you have got to be crazy. *Assuming* that you estimated everything perfectly and that circumstances don't change in the next 8 years and that the next government doesn't cancel the program, what you have gained is absolute peanuts compared to the risk you take.
Therefore, I prefer governments that hem and haw and don't do anything drastice unless they absolutely have to.
-a
I'm sure that South Africa is doing what's best for South Africa, but I hope they're not doing it just to say "why not".
They did what everybody wishes their respective governments would do: take a year to think about things, and then take decisive action
I'm sure I'm in the minority here, but I actually prefer indecisive government to decisive government. Decisive govenments tend to spend wads of money on untested programs that are then cancelled by the next government.
-a
Exactly. When you take a "Why Not" approach to innovation, you end up getting sold snake-oil.
-a
You have to love it when governments take a "why not" approach to innovation. It's something a lot of USA busineses (and government entities) could take a lesson from.
Uhh... pardon my asking, but do you have a short memory? Isn't a "why not" approach to innovation exactly what caused the tech bubble? "So you want me to invest $50 million in a company to produce a website for transvestite kamakaze circus clowns? And they want to buy a Superbowl ad? Hmmm... Why not?"
-a
It appears that, in general, South Africa has leapt way ahead of the US in a large number of policy areas, not just Open Source. They've got fundamental protections in their constitutions which are significantly stronger than those in the US (for example, you can't discriminate based on percieved sexuality, domestic partnerships are law, with same sex marriages in the works, etc.)
90% of the Western world is ahead of the US on social issues like this. South Africa may have been the longest hold out in the segregation battle, but the US isn't far behind. What other Western country is ruled by a powerful religious lobby?
-a
FYI, it is legal in Canada to rebroadcast television channels so long as it is not modified. (I don't recall any stipulations to that) There are special exceptions to the non-modification clause in that Canadian channels are permitted to play localized advertising over foreign content, as long as the same program is played. For example, we never see U.S. Superbowl commercials. We get the same game. But Canadian commercials.
I don't think you understand. When Global broadcasts the Superbowl in Canada it is because they have paid money to the NFL for the Canadian rights. Otherwise, don't you think every single Canadian network would show it?
There is also a rule that if a Canadian channel and an American channel are showing the same thing at the same time, the American channel has to use the Canadian feed. So if you watch the Simpsons on Sunday, you will see the same (Canadian) commercials whether you watch it on Fox or Global. But still, this is because Global has paid for the Canadian rights to the Simpsons.
There is no also right to rebroadcast TV channels unmodified. Honestly, I think you just made that up. The cable and satelite companies have to pay money for the channels they offer. That's why your bill went up when they increased the number of available channels. These channels can't survive by advertising alone, so rebroadcasting them would seriously damage their earnings potential.
-a
The real issue is whether the constraints on free speech are for a reasonable purpose and for a limited time.
There are plenty of valid constraints on free speech that are not time-limited. If a country passes a law forbiding websites from publishing the addresses of abortion doctors, that would be reasonable, and it doesn't have to be time-limited.
Canadian law already requires that all magazines that are sold in Canada be published as special editions (which contain a certain amount of Canadian content). I'm sure that the Canadian government is already eager to impose similar restrictions on the Internet. Filtering out sites that contravene Canadian law would be just another step in this process.
A much more serious problem is when politicians use national laws to try to suppress stories that embarass them. This is currently the case with the German Chancellor who has obtained an injunction in the German courts to prevent the Mail on Sunday from publishing allegations of adultery with a television reporter.
Of course, the real test is not that he is trying, but whether or not he succeeds. From the looks of things, he won't. Unless of course, the Mail is also sold in Germany, in which case they might be forced to publish a separate edition.
That is one reason I like Google news so much, you can compare side by side the US reports of an event with the local reports. You won't find a report of the arms embargo that Britain has imposed against Israel in the US press, but you can find it in the UK and Israeli press.
That is indeed an interesting tidbit. Of course, I tend to wonder whether this is the effect of deliberate bias or whether the American public is simply too isolationist to care. And of course, deliberate censorship is still a more difficult technical issue than simply not reporting something.
-a
It may not be the popular opinion here, but the Internet is going to have to evolve to respect the laws of sovereign nations. The Canadian law is a perfectly reasonable one; this isn't another example of Chinese censorship
-a
Perhaps they would have preferred that he also build in the same security mechanisms as other DVD players, but these, of course, would be easily defeated, assuming the code is open source. I guess I don't see a lot of details in the article, or I'm missing some of it. Would the prosecution suggest that any open source DVD player is illegal?
Quite possibly, yes. OSS creates a legal problem because there is often no one specific to sue and no one website to shut down. As we see on
I think that the whatever DVD player trade association there is out there would allow an OSS project to join (for the usual fee), but they would only allow selected portions of the code to be released as open source.
-a