VA Linux Dropping "Linux" From Name 378
Several folks noted that VA is changing its name to "VA Software" to reflect the fact that they aren't a Linux company anymore. VA of course owns OSDN which runs various Linux and Open Source web sites including amusingly enough Linux.com. Can't say it matters much to me what they call the thing as long as they let us keep running Slashdot, but it really is sad knowing that most of the cool open source hackers no longer work there. My bad. Anyone have a link to the press release that doesn't require a login?
Great for the stock price!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
I am really scared that Slashdot will be dumped real soon by "VA Whatever" and my personal data will be thrown into the wind for the company with the most pennies to snatch up. As we have seen in the past, its real tuff to control your own personal data held by a third party under extreme financial trouble.
I am sure that Pud at Fucked Company [fuckedcompany.com] will be reporting the demise of "VA Whatever" in the near future. Dump the stock if you got it.
Re:So? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Great for the stock price!!! (Score:1, Insightful)
OT (Score:1, Insightful)
-- Brian
Distance from the Linux label? (Score:2, Insightful)
The Question that Begs Asking (Score:4, Insightful)
Open source business is incomparable to closed (Score:5, Insightful)
The open source business model is not:
What other possible software market is there besides that, you ask? Look up job offers for programmers. 95% of them have nothing to do with working on a commercial software product. Most programmers develop custom systems. These are seldom sold on store shelves and never exist outside of the environment they're created in.
It just so happens open source software and custom developed systems go hand-in-hand. This is the market the open source business model targets. This market alone is far larger than the commercial software market.
This is exactly what IBM's core business is involved with, and exactly why they're so behind open source.
Re:Great for the stock price!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
One way to assess what a stock price represents is that it is the consensus of the investing public regarding what the current value of all future cash flows for the company in question will be.
Stated more simply as two questions: 1. how much do you think this company will net over your lifetime? and 2. how much are you willing to pay today in cash for the rights to receive a fraction of that total future net?
The multiplicative Pozni-like "loaves and fishes" effect of squandered venture capital led to the recent trend of tech companies being in a business other than producing technology, namely the production of securities and the paper they were printed on. Because of this loss of focus on actually making a product and a profit, these securities are no longer worth the paper they're printed on.
In the wake of this effect, you get people asserting that a stock price dropping to zero will make a company fail. In fact, most investors thinking that there will be no future stream of income, and there being a commensurate lack of buyers for the stock representing that income stream, is what causes the stock price to drop to zero.
Re:Can I Sell My Karma? (Score:1, Insightful)
This blows big-time. (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing that really gets to me is what this says about free software businesses, and about our understanding of it. Most people agreed, making a business from free software was supposed to go like this:
Yet VA Whatever has gone down in flames in a major way while RedHat is mostly going strong. Zope Corporation is doing very well too. So was Cygnus before it was bought out. And etc. ad nauseam. I guess we were flat-out wrong.
Or maybe it was VA Whatever's fault. They had it all: big visibility, a whole shitload of cash, and many of the smartest people in the business. The only snag, I think, was that Direction didn't realize that they actually needed a plan, too.
I think they still don't realize that. Someone should tell them and tell them now. Will you do it, or should I? How about you, Taco? You know the guys. GO TO THEIR OFFICE AND CLUB THEM OVER THE HEAD REPEATEDLY WHILE SCREAMING "YOU FRIGGING MORONS".
Thank you.
makes disturbing sense (Score:5, Insightful)
so basically this all makes sense with the name change... VA (s/Linux/Software/) is no longer the open-source-focused company it once was... it's sad to see things go this way...
Re:Great for the stock price!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
Self-serving people make me sick.
You don't buy stock for the purpose of underwriting your favorite failing business. If you were fool enough to do so, your ability to serve others will quickly dwindle, along with the means to maintain your own well-being. Your statement is short-sighted, and whoever modded it up is insane.
There in too much of a hurry (Score:3, Insightful)
VA will not suddenly start makinging Billions of dollars because of its name, clearly some exec is trying to blame there association with Linux as the reason for not making tons of cash. each move they have made is a panic move, sure to loose in the long run.
I see many opportunities for VA to increase revenue, but they seem to unable to see the forest from the trees.
On a personal note, I hope that if they do go under, the
Of course they could fire Jon. Clearly he makes more then he's worth.
Re:it's still ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Worried about open-source funding (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree with the fellow who spots this as a troll, nevertheless...
VA has no reason to support Slashdot, Sourceforge, Themes.org, and other very expensive sites that produce zero revenue. They will probably just sell the sites off to the highest bidder (who will just want the accumulated customer data, and shut the sites down).
What customer data? /.'s demographics-gathering is minimal, barely worth anything. OTOH, it's clear just viewing the site that /. does attract a very valuable demographic of working techs and engineers. /. is a brand name, well known to the tech industry, and one that exists with no content costs. There are tons of ways that /.'s free content can survive and prosper without VA, should it come to that. Even discounting ad revenues or corporate sponsorship to provide bandwidth, there are other ways /. and other useful resources of OSDN could be distributed than the old client/server paradigm.
We have the technology -- we can rebuild you!
Interesting lookup on LNUX finds this... (Score:5, Insightful)
Notable quote: "Four years and they haven't fired me?" said Rob "Cmdr Taco" Malda, director of operations, Slashdot. "Now that's a record."
Careful you don't jinx yourself, Rob.
Internet Wire is a PR service and the article is from VA Linux Systems. Notably lacking is any mention of VA dropping the 'Linux Systems' part.
Re:Other than OSDN what does VA do? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Dead pool for VA Linux^WSoftware Corp. (Score:3, Insightful)
Linux experts will still be in demand. Linux will still be the preferred platform for doing software development for many organisations. Some companies think it's OK to fork out $10K+ in licences for developer seats, and insist on using only MS tools, or other even more expensive solutions. A frugal software shop would develop on Linux, and deploy on whichever platform the customer wants.
The only thing that's changing is the rock star mentality . Tomorrow's Linux professionals will not expect to retire when they're 30, they'll expect to retire at a normal age. The days of "Money for nothing, chicks for free" are no more,
except if you're singing in one of those boy bands, that is.
Re:Worried about open-source funding (Score:2, Insightful)
VA screwed up by not having any direction. Acquisitions and willy-nilly funding of anything that has "open source" tacked onto its manifesto is driving them down. That, coupled with the FACT that most Linux users seem to want everyone ELSE to spend $$ on Linux (but they never seem to think they themselves are obligated to do so) is contributing to a downturn in the Linux biz that has little to do with economic conditions.
In other words, I'm not surprised one iota that VA is falling apart, and I will not be surprised when they eventually fall down. It'll be sad -- I wanted them to succeed, being a former stock holder -- but they had no clue. May other companies use their rise to fame and rapid descent into oblivion as a lesson on how NOT to do business.
Re:Where can they make a profit now? (Score:5, Insightful)
IMHO, their mistake was trying to go from a niche market (nice Linux-running boxen) straight to a megacorporation with a wide range of products (a la IBM). They tried to make that jump by maximizing the burn rate, but burn rate can only buy green employees and hardware. It cannot buy an experienced engineering and development staff, mature software products, and all-important customer relationships and business partnerships. It is possible to build a large diverse company, but you have to expand in stages with attention to profitability every step of the way. E.g., like how Microsoft came from no where and dethroned IBM and DEC. The whole 'Instant IBM' approach was just doomed.
If you look at VA, their strategy was 100% Instant IBM. They tried to dominate the hardware market before they had the mature software and hand-holding support to make the extra cost worthwhile. They bought Slashdot to preach to the converted and shill house products. (Remember the Adfu days when /. banners occassionally had interesting products that actual geeks might buy? The only thing even vaguely interesting these days is Think Geek.) They threw *huge* amounts of money at bandwidth, hosting, and server administration in the hope of increasing the amount of free software. Nevermind that VA would have neither licenses nor expertise in the software thus developed, and could therefore not directly profit from it.
So what are they left with? Banner ads (ha!) for things I don't want to buy (ha! ha!) and SourceForge. SourceForge support and cusom development can probably be made profitable by itself -- it's a useful tool -- but even if it is maximally successful and they get a CEO with a winning strategy, it'll take a decade to recover the capital they pissed away. I don't see them getting such a CEO (although the board could surprise us), so don't see VA even being a software powerhouse.
If I was part of the /. crew, I'd be thinking hard about how to turn what they have into something sustainable. Random ideas: banner ads for tech products I might actually buy, paid placement of a few stories a week, paid Slash hosting (product support sites, religious/political sites, government sites), closed-source turn-key Slash installer, ...
Re:Great for the stock price!!! (Score:0, Insightful)
I'm curious, why does everyone refer to these people as extremist muslims? People don't refer to the IRA as extremist catholics.
Re:Why the urge for getting Linux mainstream? (Score:2, Insightful)
Most of the die-hard Linux evangelists (of which I am one) are pushing Linux because we see that as the best means to our ends. And those ends are to get Windows
Hell, before I got involved with Linux, I was writing my own OS (Syrinx) specifically for this purpose. Then 386BSD (or was it BSD386? don't remember) and Linux were both starting up at the time. I generally prefer BSD flavors of UNIX to SysV flavors (I'm addicted to ^Z, and my early experience with SysV stuff -- SCO UNIX and AT&T SysV -- didn't support a posteriori backgrounding), so I took a look at 386BSD. It didn't support my ESDI drives, so I couldn't even test it. Linux did. So I could play with it. And it was quite spiffy. So I abandoned Syrinx and jumped in with both feet and have been there since. If 386BSD had supported ESDI drives when I tested it, I'd probably be a *BSD bigot instead of a Linux bigot. Sure, some of you can argue that I should've just added support for ESDI mysqlf, but in those days 386BSD wasn't accepting patches from the general public, and the developers told me that they had no interest in supporting ESDI. To top it all off, I couldn't even play around with it enough to see if it was interesting enough to warrant the effort of adding that support myself.
(To this day, Linux is the only operating system that understands the Syrinx partition type, and there is only one computer running Syrinx: an old 25MHz 286 that I sold to a buddy many years ago).
you are a troll, but you said something useful (Score:3, Insightful)
Say goodbye to UNIX support. It's expensive to develop for UNIX compared to Windows. VB programmers are a dime a dozen and can be hired for $30k a year, so why would a software company want to hire anyone else? The former "LNUX" will soon be in bed with Microsoft before we know it.
This is stupid stuff. Do you really know what the cost of using Windoze junk is? I work at a company that M$ is deep into. The productivity lost is astounding. We have spent fortunes on closed source junk that can never cross comunicate, never works that well and sits on a crippled OS. VB apps that get broken with every change in M$ Office, IE and service pack are the least of our problems. At least we can throw co-ops at maintaining that junk. A larger problem comes from custom applications that never talk to each other, much less the M$ Office the company delcared "standard". Consultants and new hires are astounded at the Byzantine complexity of the tools we are expected to use to get our jobs done. In the end, you find your workers hanging around the printers for jobs that may or may not come through. VA can die, but that won't make closed source junk any better. The alternatives to free software are less and less atractive.
Re:This blows big-time. (Score:2, Insightful)
Only if you're selling highly proprietary hardware. There's not much margin in Intel based hardware...