Stock Market...

W. Wayne Liauh LiauhW001 at Hawaii.rr.com
Sat Sep 8 16:19:38 PDT 2001


How can you expect a company, which makes products that you can freely use 
and which does not own intellectual property right to their products, to 
survive when the venture capital dries up?

Red Hat is moving into a database (Postgres) service company, Caldera is 
charging per seat licensing fees for their distros, and VA Linux is counting 
on making proprietary software out of its SourceForge operations.  They are 
taking their respective routes to survival.

"Free" is good, but it is also an ugly word.  One thing for sure, if you plan 
to develop "free" software, even though you may claim to be able to provide 
the best service, no VC will be interested in you.

Corel is temporarily shelving its Linux effort; however, as I have noticed, 
Corel is re-designing its products (which include WordPerfect Office and 
Corel Draw) so that they can be more easily ported into Linux, should such a 
market eventually develop.

But the Linux big three: Red Hat, VA Linux, and Caldear, are changing their 
business modes to move Linux into the next stage.  Whether they can succeed 
(I believe they will, as they all have a very good cash position), has a 
critical bearing to whether Linux can become a main stream OS.



On Saturday 08 September 2001 12:01, you wrote:
> Red Hat's stock price does not accurately reflect their market position.
> Their stock price is entirely the result of market PERCEPTION and not
> revenues, as their revenues have steadily increased and beat market
> projections, at the same time the market lost more and more confidence and
> sold off all tech stocks, not just theirs.  In the last fiscal quarter Red
> Hat actually broke even (after one-time adjustments from acquisitions,
> etc.) They also have plenty in the blank... if I recall correctly it was
> $200 million.  Keep in mind that that is without ANY burn-rate.  Their next
> fiscal quarter I predict they will lose a few cents per share, but they are
> in no danger of going out of business.
>
> Red Hat, Mandrake, and theKompany are actually proven and profitable
> businesses.  Thankfully.
>
> However, I am deeply worried about VA Linux, Caldera, Ximian and Loki
> Software.  All four companies are incredibly important players in the open
> source community..
>
> VA Linux - Sourceforge
> Caldera - Smooth migration path from SCO Unix.  Caldera is now the world's
> largest Unix company in revenue.
> Ximian - Gnome, Evolution, Red Carpet
> Loki Software - Not the games, but the open source libraries that they
> developed are VERY important to the community.
>
> Other players like Eazel and Corel have made incredible contributions too,
> but they have already failed.
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: <epsas at inflicted.net>
> To: "Linux & Unix Advocates & Users" <luau at list.luau.hi.net>
> Sent: Saturday, September 08, 2001 10:16 AM
> Subject: [luau] Stock Market...
>
> > It seems that a few community businesses are close to going out of
>
> business.  What does this mean for the Open Source business model?  Should
> the community look to conventional businesses for employment instead of
> clamouring to get a position at the next Linux software company?  I don't
> know, but it's all a bit scary, I guess....
>
> > VA Linux
> > http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=LNUX&d=c
> >
> > Redhat
> > http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=RHAT&d=c&k=c1&t=1y&a=v&p=s&l=on&z=m&q=l
> >
> > Caldera
> > http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=cald&d=c&k=c4
>
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