The Upcoming LinuxOne IPO

AlphaBrav sent news that LinuxOne is planning to up their IPO price range. For those who don't know who LinuxOne is, don't feel bad: read this amazing article that point by point shows that there are more problems with this company then I can list in this space, although my favorites include their CEOs questionable past, GPL violations, and a corporate web server that not only doesn't run their own distribution but offers to sell you a (binary only) CD if only you send your credit card unencrypted to them. Best of all, their ticker symbol is set to be LINX.

"fellow" open-source developers?

hmm...The article says that LinuxOne has reserved shares for "fellow" open-source developers. Two questions:

1. Did anyone get "the letter"? If you did, are you going to buy shares?
2. What open-source development have they done? Did they GPL the big scam that they're putting on here?

Now, it's great that everyone here on /. knows that linuxone sucks. Does anyone in the "real world" know? Like, do bankers, and mutual fund managers, and people like that know how bad this company is going to fail? If not, does Slashdot (or Andover) have enough clout to talk to the folks at cnn.com, abcnews.com, or some other mass-media place to get the word out?

Oooh golly

Up from $6-$8 per share to... *gasp* $8.25! These guys just OOZE confidence!

Hrm. The only thing that makes me feel better is that a quick check of techstocks.com, fool.com, and ragingbull.com shows that nobody has even started any message boards for LINX yet. For those of you that frequent these boards, do your best to educate. The link above (http://www.linuxworld.com/linuxworld/lw-1999-11/l w-11-linuxone.html) is a great place to start.

People whine about Red Hat going corporate, and Corel GPL violations, which is fine. Let's keep them honest. But if you really want to defend Linux's integrity as it enters the corporate world, debunking LinuxOne is probably a great place to start.
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Perens on LinuxOne

Bruce Perens' piece, "Let's run LinuxOne out of town on a rail" is here [technocrat.net].

Yin and yang

This LinuxOne looks like a bad idea waiting to happen. For the purposes of this comment I'm going to assume it crashes and burns. But I'm going to go out on a limb and say that this is a necessary thing.

You may have heard the saying "all publicity is good publicity." What is going to happen if LinuxOne turns out to be a terrible company and a ton of investors get burned on a shoddy distribution? LinuxOne is going to get bad publicity. Most of it will be from the traditional media, many of whom still think all Linux is the same thing, and therefore the bigger a flop LinuxOne becomes, the bigger a black mark against "Linux/OpenSource."

This blanketing attitude is changing, though; even CBS can tell the difference between a RedHat and a VA. And if LinuxOne burns some people, it will be our opportunity to turn bad news into good. We need to represent LinuxOne as the Yin to our Yang. We need to say, "This is what happens when you do it wrong," in addition to, "This over here is what happens when you do it right."

Over time, this will add news media credibility to our store. It will make it possible for people to tell the difference between a good Linux distribution and a bad one, and as a point of comparison it will clarify some issues in peoples' heads over why Open Source is a good idea, and why it is successful.

Hmmm..

Trying 216.101.248.91...
Connected to rinoa.LinuxOne.NET.
Escape character is '^]'.

Welcome to LinuxOne! This is rinoa.
Red Hat Linux release 6.0 (Hedwig)
Kernel 2.2.5-15 on an i686
login:

Riiiight.

LinuxOne is the Commodore of Linux

And I'm not talking about the good parts of Commodore, either. (The PET and the Amiga were both phenominal for their time.)

This is clearly an attempt to rake in a fortune and run. There's no product there. If there was, and it was any good, they'd use it. They don't. If they knew enough to -make- a system, they'd have secure e-commerce. They don't. If they understood the licence, they wouldn't be doing binary-only distributions. They are.

IMHO, we'll see the board cut & run to some tax haven that has no extradition treaty with the US or Europe within a year, probably months, possibly even weeks, after the IPO.

This probably won't be fatal to Linux. In fact, the sooner they run, the better for Linux, as it'll be clearer that it was crooks and not simply computer geeks pretending to be business nerds. It -will- be damaging to Linux, though, if the pretense keeps going long enough for people to believe that the guys are genuine, because then that could provoke a backlash against the whole Open Source concept. ("Look at Bill Gates! Now -HE- knows how to run a company. These wannabe's, with their high ideals and no business sense are just wasters and loosers.")

The sooner LinuxOne explodes into a corruption scandal, the better it'll be for everyone. IMHO, it'll happen sooner or later, whether that's tomorrow or 50 years from now. I'd just rather it was early enough for it to not take down the entire Open Source movement with it.

IMHO, if these guys want money, will some rich twit give it to them, and tell them to go away? Far as I'm concerned, they're going to get the money anyway, but it needn't senselessly destroy everything that the Linux community has worked to build. The Linux community is incidental to LinuxOne's aims, so it doesn't harm or benefit them if it survives or vanishes. There's no reason for them to work for either end. I'd rather it survived, though, and hope Open Source isn't an innocent victim in this game.

Re:Stop It

Yeah... it took me a little while to explain the whole concept of Open Source developement to my better half. She is notably adept with computers (and never flinched when she's had to use Linux for something), but the discussion opened up with, "Well - who owns Linux?" The concept that this OS isn't owned like MS owns Windoze is not something that everyone grasps right away.

My uncle mentioned to me that Linux won't do well because it doesn't have the marketing dollars that MS does. I didn't really have the time to explain the situation... The general public (and even those close to us geek types) just aren't well informed about these subjects and can be easily mislead.

Bottom line - one of those stock symbols *has* to be the company that makes linux, right? Oh - I get it - RedHat wrote linux and now this VA place sells linux computers? Right?
(sound of palm smacking forehead)

What it sounds like to me...

I know this probably sounds crazy, but put a few pointers in here...

1. This guy started NetUSA, and the company went public.

2. NetUSA is failing in public, it's lost huge amounts of money and the stock price is falling drastically.

3. HE probably owned a majority share of NetUSA, right? So he gained quite a bit of money from those stocks... now, legally he could neither sell them nor use that money for six months. However...

4. Now he starts a NEW company, and tries to send it public within six months, a ridiculously short time for such things. Which, at ANY price, will bring in a nice chunk of pocket change...

5. Gee, sounds a little fishy - you think he might be using one to fund the other? Illegal, yes, impossible? No.

He's already shown disregard for people (laws?) by hosting spammail junk. Considering the (lack of) history for this company, I wouldn't be surprised if this is exactly what's happening. I hope he gets caught and jailed.

-Elthia
opinionated as ever

SCAM. lookout

This is a scam. I phoned their sales line and was not able to get ANY useful information out of them. The genetleman could barely speak english. When I asked about LinuxMac, he stated that it lets you read Macintosh disks under Linux. For ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS? GET REAL! The HFS utils has been around for as long as I can remember. This is absoultely absurd.

When I asked what the difference between RedHat and LinuxOne is, he said that there is little difference, and when I asked why I should buy LinuxOne instead of RedHat, he was unable to answer my question.

If you've got any furthur questions, their toll free sales line is: 1-877-Linux12

Re:Inappropriate commentary

HebGDb Stated: "For CmdrTaco to essentially decry this company as a scam is entirely inappropriate. He, and this website, are owned by a close competitor, so comments like these not only have no objectivity, but should be viewed as highly suspicious and manipulative"

Except here is the problem. This statement is utterly untrue. LinuxOne is a distribution developer. Andover.net/Slashdot/etc are simply informational/resource websites.
This is like comparing Yahoo to Microsoft.

Why Every Day-Trader Will Lose

Assume that daytrader buys and sells his entire portfolio once per day, and trades 300 days out of the year. On every stock there is a spread between the buy and sell prices which is profit for the market-maker. Assume that daytrader loses half a percent of his portfolio to the spread on every buy and every sell, thus he loses 1% per day to spread. His loss per year is 300%. Thus, his trading strategy must triple his money every year simply to break even. It's unlikely that he'll do that well.

No wonder they go nonlinear. The system is stacked against them from the start.

Bruce