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Linuxcare Businesses

The Downward Spiral Of Linuxcare? 101

Posted by CmdrTaco from the stuff-to-read dept.
starvo pointed us to a ZD Net story about the recent trouble at LinuxCare. It's got a fair amount of details about all the problems that led to both the CEO & CIO jumping. Linuxcare has been pretty mysterious about the whole thing, so it's nice to finally get some meat to chew on... the article is relatively fair.
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Linuxcare, a Downard Spiral? More

Linuxcare, a Downard Spiral?

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  • Oh geez - a troll posing as an intellectual...

    --

  • When Linuxcare was expanding from 30 to 200 employees over the course of a six-month period, people with good Linux skills should have been snapped up (since all the while Linuxcare was complaining about the lack of qualified employees).

    This really was a case (cited in the article) of poor business practices and poor execution.

  • Re:it's sad but true (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It really frustrates you when someone parades around phony credentials who isn't a heavy duty 'Open Source Partisan.'

    Does ESR have a degree? What are his credentials (beyond his peer standing and the fact that he's an old, old gadfly)?

    Meritocracy, schmeritocracy.
  • the JJJJJulius port of the bridge game is wonderful, especially the way it pulls in the incautious and gullible.

    Oops, I think I hear someone walking on it now.

    George
  • I have been thinking about the current marketing paradigm amongst OSS companies which is making software a commodity and then charging for support. The more I think about it, the more uncomfortable I feel. According to Open Source main proponent, ESR, Open Source is a superior engineering model than Closed Source and hence Open Source Software should be more reliable and stable than most Closed Source Software. This means that Open Source Software should need less support than Closed Source software.

    Less support != no support. Going back to the oft-used "would you buy a car with the hood welded-shut?" analogy, of course a dealer who has monopoly control over servicing a car will make more money than a garage mechanic when anyone who is able to is allowed to service cars. And indeed, people who do know how to service their own cars can do so. But that doesn't mean that you can't make a living being a car mechanic. It just means that you won't be able to become the worlds richest man like Bill Gates using that kind of strategy.

    The reality is that most people still need to purchase support for their products. Whether that support is paid for honestly via a yearly contract, or via forced upgrades to the latest version of MS-Office due to incompatible file-formats, you're still paying support/maintenance fees for your software, one way or another. And for those people who can't fix their computer problems on their own, or who could fix it, but don't have the time to do it themselves, there'll always be room for support plays.

    Don't forget, companies like IBM make far more money off their professional service department than they do off of selling hardware or software. This doesn't change whether you're using Linux or some propietary software. What does change is the quality of the software, the quality of the support, and the fact that it's easier to support OSS. However, "easier to support" still doesn't mean that any random liberal-arts student is going to be able to support the software. That's why garage mechanics aren't going out of business, even though anyone could (in theory) learn how to fix their own cars.

  • According to Open Source main proponent, ESR, Open Source is a superior engineering model than Closed Source and hence Open Source Software should be more reliable and stable than most Closed Source Software. This means that Open Source Software should need less support than Closed Source software.

    Let's examine your argument: better engineering means better stability and reliability. Better reliability and stability means less support.

    Oops! Assumption that support needs are due to un-reliability or un-stability. Not necessarily true. Many support issues relate to: planning, installation, operation and maintenance of stable, reliable systems. This is the nature of complex, full-featured operating systems and applications.

    Sure, a web browser doesn't need a maonthly support contract (or, shouldn't), but a web server might. Why? Is the web server a piece of junk? No! The web server is complex, with thousands of configuration options and optimizations. Add a dynamic and growing work load and there may be a need for expert tweaking to keep up with your business's success.

    The point is, complex yet reliable systems may need support not due to engineering shortcomings but due to the inherent flexibility of quality software.

    If "one size fits all" you can be sure that "no size fits anyone well". A tailored suit is more expensive and needs much more customization (especially for dynamically expanding clients) but the engineering is doubtlessly the best.

  • Interesting point, but you left the consumer out of your equations...

    Your basic argument was that open source is in trouble because:

    Open source: Low cost, less support needed. / Close source: higher cost, more support needed.

    It seems to me that if this is true, customers will continue to migrate towards the cheaper option. In the end, it may be impossible to build "the next Microsoft" using the open-source model, but if your analysis is right, the open-source companies will eventually be the only ones who survive. MICROS~1 & their ilk might also hang in there, but only by converting to the superior model and cutting the fat out of their companies.

    OTOH, if this shift fails to happen in the next few years, it will be pretty compelling evidence that ESR was wrong.

  • I don't think that the CEO gambled on the IPO, what I think happend was that he looked at it as his golden monkey. He came in to the company and wanted to cash in on the exuberant stock market so he could get his $1 billion. He didn't care about the business at all, he didn't want to acutally grow it.

    CP

  • Was Lack of Focus an Issue? (Score:4)

    by theonetruekeebler ( 60888 ) on Tuesday May 23, 2000 @06:43AM (#1054126) Homepage Journal
    The article provided good insight into the consequences of internal infighting among suits, the discord caused when management pretends its job is to rule its employees rather than facilitate their work as revenue generators, and the damage that can be done when a company spends money it doesn't have and may never get.

    And right now the V.C.s are getting cold feet. It could be a bad time for LinuxCare to get a boost from outside. On the other hand, they've been around for a couple of years--hardly a random startup.

    My subject question about lack of focus has to do with the increasing market visibility of particular brands of Linux versus that of generic Linux. I think that potential buyers now think of things not in terms of Linux--Linux itself is a given--but in terms of Red Hat vs. Caldera vs. SuSE vs. Turbo vs. Debian blah blee blah bloe. Saying you support Linux anymore is like saying you repair cars, when what cautious car owners want is to go to their manufacturer or dealership and get their service done there. Car is the commodity; Lincoln is the brand.

    I don't know much about who LinuxCare sells its services to; would it be possible for LinuxCare to improve its revenue stream by becoming a support subcontractor to the companies who have the brand names and market presence? Say they started handling Red Hat's support calls. Red Hat is a known and trusted name at far as Linux goes; companies seeking support for their Red Hat systems would probably want to get support from Red Hat than a third party. Even if they knew the support call was transparently being re-routed somewhere else, there is a certain sense of security when the phone is answered "Red Hat Support Services, can I help you?"

    Both companies could win big on an arrangement like this: LinuxCare could handle 99% of all calls themselves, and only bring Red Hat into the situation when things have gotten really obscure.

    --

  • That wasn't the ThinkGeek 'You are dumb' shirt, was it ?
  • I'm surprised by how many posters discount LC's basic business model. The fact is we are in the very early stages of the adoption curve for Open Source technologies (and that's probably even true of Apache, whose 62% market share could easily climb to >90% in the next five years.) In the future there are going to be tons of companies who want (need) some legal entity to stand behind their systems. The fact that the source is open and HOWTOs are plentiful only means that the support will be easier to provide than for proprietary apps, so customer satisfaction should slowly rise. Unfortunately, LC has bungled the whole thing.

    I hate to quote scrip-cha but I think Eric Raymond [tuxedo.org] and Tim O'Reilly [oreillynet.com] are right on regarding the viability of the business model. (Granted, TOR is arguing for a much more expanded services offering, but it's still a services offering.)
  • Glad I wasn't the only one thinking that. :-)

    The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk
  • They're kinda pointless... if you can't read USENET, LDP, or a man page you shouldn't be running *nix anyway.

    Linuxcare is pointless because the tech support is out there all over the place. The few people who need to be spoonfed w/ Linuxcare will get frustrated with Linux and go back to Micro$oft.

    I understand that people like Linus and the rest of the Linux "bigwigs" want to make the OS more user friendly and accessable to more people... but I still don't see the basic computer user running Linux as their desktop OS. At least not today...
  • I didn't say that, you mexican. I said memory power.
  • Multiple revenue streams are required or else it is all for naught.

    That's pretty good advice for any business. Selling support is a reactive strategy. What is needed is a proactive strategy.

    I think that the so-called Linux companies are going to have to evolve into consulting companies. They will have to hire aggressive (but informed) sales staffs to create alliances with established, well known companies (ie IBM and RedHat) in order to survive. Eventually, I can see where these companies either buy up the business of other companies or are bought out buy larger entities like IBM.
  • But if linux is to take hold, shouldn't it be branching out into the market of (as people often call them here) lusers, where the real money is anyway? Exactly, M$ is not making all of their money selling NT Server and NT Server suport, they are making it selling millions of copy of Win98 to people who will never RTFM. The Admins who are using NT/Unix/Linux and other real operating systems are going to news groups and colleagues first before making the big support call.
  • I didn't say that, you mexican. I said brain power.

    So did I. What are talking about? I wouldn't misquote you any more than you'd purposely misunderstand me.
    --
    Have Exchange users? Want to run Linux? Can't afford OpenMail?
  • That's it, donkey licker. I'm emailing CmdrTaco about your trolling. He'll bitchslap you into next week, fool.
  • Help yourself. Be sure to point him to the top of the thread. You know, where you displayed supposedly poor math and your purposeful misunderstandings. Your trolling in other words.
    --
    Have Exchange users? Want to run Linux? Can't afford OpenMail?
  • The article provided good insight into the consequences of internal infighting among suits, the discord caused when management pretends its job is to rule its employees rather than facilitate their work as revenue generators, and the damage that can be done when a company spends money it doesn't have and may never get.
    To cover your title a bit, yes. In part, the "lack of focus" problem is inherent in open source development: each developer has a vector and the sum of those vectors may not be useful to a company. So, we have a whole bunch of people used to "doing their own thing." How does one harness that without destroying what works about it? It's easier when there's an extant company and it builds slowly.

    I will say that Linuxcare had MUCH heavier-handed management than I've seen elsewhere. There was an attitude that people with bad morale will be fired. Not exactly the best way to foster high morale.

    The more I learn about Jean-Louis Gassee, the more I think he had things right. A few quotes from "The Quotable JLG" [bedope.com]:

    "Company cultures are mysterious, how they're born, how they evolve, how they can or can't be changed once they've become a liability. Something to fear, something to admire."

    "Let me add that we have no HR department and don't plan to have one. We believe management should manage without interference or excuse."

    "Another aspect of our work environment is that we're cheap. In some companies, the thought police would advise me to say 'spartan,' but once you see the pair of 8-foot couches I bought for $10 in the summer of 1991, when we set up our first office in San Jose, you'll probably agree that cheap is the word."

    "Don't ask me 'When is our IPO?' My office overlooks the parking lot, and when I see the BMWs of investment bankers fighting for spaces, I'll know it's time." (Be has since IPOed)

    And, given the amount Linuxcare spent in its second round, I found this quote especially applicable:

    "After more than six years, we spent less than $20 million. I know a number of companies that feel there's nothing you can do with $20 million."

    _Deirdre

  • I love to see a place as biased as Slashdot comment on how fair or biased another news organization is. (Actually, I shouldn't say another... since Slashdot gets all it's content from others - they aren't a real news organization.)

    It's great when Slashdot calls something biased or unfair... talk about the pot calling the kettle black!
  • Not only do you reply to my posts way too fast, but you have bad grammar. CmdrTaco accepts bad grammar from NO ONE. It's one of his personal quirks.
  • Well I just hope they are around long enough fo me to get the newest version of their Bootable Business Card CD.

  • Dude, if I could moderate you up I would.

    Open source software is a nice concept, but by it's very nature very few people will be able to make a living by it.

    --

  • How easy can it be to survive for a company that is offering GNU/Linux care? Well, it can be pretty difficult. Most GNU/Linux users are self taught (there are no real classes on this OS) programmers. These people used GNU/Linux way before Linux Care came alone. These people know where and how to get the information they need in order to fix their video driver problem.

    On the other hand, the companies that use GNU/Linux solutions also must hire GNU/Linux administrators, programmers and support team members. But where do you get all these people from? Not from Windows users, obviously. Not even from Unix admins since those guys can get a job just doing what they always have being doing: Unix. So basically the companies who use GNU/Linux hire those self taught programmers who run GNU/Linux for years and who already know where and how to get this information. So what is Linux Care to do?

  • Let me count the ways (Score:3)

    by gelfling ( 6534 ) on Tuesday May 23, 2000 @05:11AM (#1054143) Homepage Journal
    Hmmmm... let's see:
    1 A new CEO w/23 years exp in a successful but slow moving hidebound bureaucratic company
    2 Lots of pressure to go public before the VC cash runs out
    3 An untested business model
    4 Few if any internal process or business controls
    5 A new CIO 3000 miles from the home office developing a business critical function on his own
    6 Building a tech support/CRM application from scratch where many components probably already exist. And oh yeah - no real customers to verify any of the basic assumptions or development requirements

    Do I have this right? Is there any reason to suppose that success would have been possible? Nope.
  • No, stock prices reflect the current perceived value of a company, nothing more. Yeah, most of the tech stocks value are based on future potential - that's also why they are incredibly bad investments.

    --

  • I *seriously* doubt the use of closed technologies has *anything* to do with their financial troubles.

    --

  • Don't forget, companies like IBM make far more money off their professional service department than they do off of selling hardware or software. This doesn't change whether you're using Linux or some propietary software.

    That's the point, it does. Let me ask you this, do you think that there is a market for selling Apache support? Selling support for Open Source Software doesn't work as an exclusive business model because unlike proprietary software most people who have jobs working with OSS have a clue and they have the source or at least have access to people who have the source. This means that unlike IBM and MSFT who can rest assured that if there is a problem with their software their users will have to call their expensive support lines, users of OSS can simply fix the code or ask on a newsgroup and get a faster and sometimes better response from some enterprising hacker than from some tech support flunkie. I see selling Linux support being like selling toys online, anyone can do it but the market will only support one or two major players while the rest will flounder and die.

  • The kind that has literary knowledge greater than that taught in the second grade.

    --

  • So, wouldn't that be the top 10 items?
  • You're kidding, right?

    Do you know the *massive* amounts of money they spent on wacky, closed-source server technology for their knowledge base and other IT projects? (which, I might add, didn't work very well).

  • I don't think KT was originally hosted by LinuxCare, so maybe someone else would be happy to host it. I'm sure one of the major distribution vendors would be interested.

    I'd miss it if it didn't exist too, because I like to keep up on the changes and some really interesting architecture discussions, but I don't want to read 50 messages (or however many) a day. KT provides a pretty good executive summary, provided in layman's terms since the KT author isn't really a kernel hacker himself.

  • Re:Geeks vs. Suits (Score:3)

    by zorgon ( 66258 ) on Tuesday May 23, 2000 @06:28AM (#1054151) Homepage Journal
    Yes, that wasn't covered well in the article was it?

    I think VCs == suits by definition, and Kleiner Perkins is one of the big VC firms, yes?

    Worth starting a thread on the topic of what makes a good suit in a geek world -- not all VC firms are this control-oriented. Cheers

  • They were always bound to fail - from personal experience this kind of support organisation can't no longer survive.

    I spent many years working for a company offering specialist technical support on a number of platforms to many UK companies.

    This was before the internet was popular, when the only resources we had were the manufacturer's technical bulletins, patch release notes, and our own experience. We flourished, because no-one else offered such a proficient service. We must have had 60+ customers, logging fairly technical support calls.

    We'd have some very obscure problems to resolve, but always acheived a resolution.

    Later we'd get a few other resources to work from, such as messages posted on Compuserve (remember them!).

    Then in 1995, customers started to get internet access. Gradually customers use us less and less, as they were able to post to the relevant newsgroup or mailing list, or search dejanews.

    No-one would use us any more to obtain patches or fixes. A savvy sysadmin could avoid using us at all, except when things went really wrong and Guru type calls were needed. For the last year there, most of my calls were of this nature.

    By the beginning of 1998 we only were still going as we had gained a number of customers from our rival, as they had already decided it was no longer paying. By the end of the year we had one major customer left, and a couple of smaller sites. The company moved into facilities management and bespoke software to stay afloat.

  • This article is so wrong (Score:3)

    by k8to ( 9046 ) on Tuesday May 23, 2000 @06:29AM (#1054153) Homepage
    Look guys, The CEO was a bad choice. The LXCare people knew this way early, but it's not an easy thing to fire a CEO. The CIO was brough in by him and was a fool. The both bled capital like crazy, the one in rediculous expenses, the other in the stupid "Sorcerer" project which was more or less irrelevant to their main business model.

    What we've seen recently is two things

    1. The booting of the incompetent, irrelevant, moneywasters
    2. The trimming down of the staff to fit a company not planning on making all their money off an IPO.

    Yes, LinuxCare doesn't have guaranteed success right now, but neither does Red Hat, Caldera, etc. Most Linux companies are in growth/bleed mode., which is always tricky.

    I believe that if LinuxCare can focus on providing a high quality core product, and that is support, they will do fine.

  • So don't judge me by how effective my IT support team may or may not be.

    Steven, while it may not be "fair", the fact remains that people will judge you by the web presense of the organization to which you have choosen to so closely identify yourself with. Especially given the tone of your first post, where you basically sold yourself off as the expert that the experts came to for help, you should expect this sort of harsh judgment from a technical audience.

    The current state of your organization's web presence needs to be fixed, or you need to stop including it in your user profile and postings. Until either one of these things happens, you will continue to be judged by your web site.

    Lean on your IT people to pick up the ball they dropped and get things up to speed--a stale web site reflects poorly not only on you, but on all at jjjjulius.com.

  • You say:

    The reality is that most people still need to purchase support for their products. Whether that support is paid for honestly via a yearly contract, or via forced upgrades to the latest version of MS-Office due to incompatible file-formats, you're still paying support/maintenance fees for your software, one way or another

    The problem with this argument is that OSS tends to cut out the forced upgrade angle since bug fixes, product enhancements, and what not are all provided free (as in beer). Therefore, the only support revenue streams you have are (1) purchase at retail of the distribution (i.e. Red Hat Deluxe) or (2) paid support plans.

    This is much different than the continuing cycle of support & upgrade with proprietary softare. Don't forget that most, if not all commercial companies (Microsoft included) can charge for the initial retail, upgrade, and ongoing support revenue.

    The bottom line is that you've got to sell a lot of software at $75 a pop (with installation support) to even start to make a dent. And you've got to keep doing it every year.

  • Disregard my post. I guess we're all having a bad day.
  • It's a shame that European governments and media continue to mischaracterize American life.

    You see, they HAVE to create an impression that American liberties lead to violence, ignorance, and poverty -- it's the most effective way to keep their own citizens from demanding the same liberties.

    The same tactics have been employed on a larger scale in China, Cuba, and the old Soviet Union. They created the false impression that America is a place dominated by chaos and prejudice -- no sane person would choose life in a free country over the order and safety of an authoritarian government.

    Personally, I'm thankful that I live in a country where people have tasted freedom first-hand and intend to keep it. I'm glad my government's powers were severely limited from day one. I will happily accept the responsibilities and "risks" of my freedom because I want my destiny controlled by me -- not a bureaucrat. I accept the risk because I know the reward is so much greater.

    In fact, my only complaint about America right now is the number of citizens who fear their freedom and want to trade it for government-promised security which will never come. How dare these people compromise my liberty for the sake of their own cowardice!? Perhaps they should relocate to the same country as our Anonymous Coward poster here.

    All non-Americans who continue to use Slashdot as forum to spread your government and media-generated lies be warned -- I'm not going to sit quietly and let you continue. Keep whatever system of government you want, but LEAVE MINE ALONE.
  • They had over 50% after the first round, they dropped way down after the second round. This article hits everything right on the button. I don't see all the former linuxcare employees chiming in this time around. I hope they succeed. If they don't , it will be a good case study of a high profile startup gone bad.
    Cheers,
    WFE
    ===========
  • I may not be a high-falutin' MBA, but having worked in several startups of my own, I feel I have some input here. Damn near all companies (even those not run by geeks) have a positive burn rate in their first 2-5 years. If they make it through this period, they are usually solvent thereafter, and if they don't, well, some large percent (maybe 80% or so) of all new companies fail. Making the gross generalization that the "Quake players" caused the positive burn rate is an unfair stereotype.

    Dave Blau

  • I worked at e*trade (in technology) almost the entire time that Nassaur was there. Nassaur, didn't have much to do with e*trade's architecture. That whole site was completed before he was actually hired. He was also in Atlanta, and almost all of the architecture, technology decisions were made in palo alto.
    Of course not. It was really obvious from the S-1 filings that Nassaur was a train wreck. Senior management usually lasts in a company longer than a year.

    Also, E*Trade had been a viable company with substantial infrastructure before he arrived.

    Remember, he was hired for an air of legitimacy, not for any actual skill. ::rolls eyes::

    _Deirdre

  • One problem with selling support for OSS is that a small company of 30-or-so hackers with little or no management/marketing overhead can offer a better level of support than a big corporation, at least locally.
    Actually, you've kind of hit the nail on the head. I've mentioned this to several reporters who've called.

    Hint: name FIVE large, publically traded, software-services-only companies. Now, name FIVE large, publically traded software publishers. Name FIVE large, publically traded computer hardware vendors. Why do you think it's harder to find examples in the first category?

    The issue, though, is that there's a fundamental economic issue: it's relatively easy to get a group of skilled Linux people to do support, at least on a small scale. With easy entry and exit from the market, there's no real barrier to competition. Thus, in this industry, the tendency toward profit is ZERO. It has nothing to do with whether or not it's OSS.

    I don't care what ESR says, he obviously skipped first semester microeconomics.

    Having been the financial manager of a business in another industry with similar competition constraints, I can say that cost management is quite critical. Linuxcare didn't get this. They still don't.

    _Deirdre

  • Missing the point, as usual (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I've seen a lot of posts about how selling support for free software is not a viable business model, for various reasons I don't care to repeat here.

    These criticisms are generally without basis, because the people making them do not understand the nature of the support marketplace or, indeed, what a service&support company like Linuxcare actually does.

    Linuxcare is certainly not intending to make money off of setting up GNU/Linux systems for every J. Random Luser. In fact it is better for the service business in the long run if these people are simply given the tools to help themselves, under the assumption that this will grow the marketplace and increase awareness of free software as a viable platform for whatever-it-is-people-are-doing, as well as being good PR for the company.

    Where money is being made is in selling expertise to large organizations, often at a "macro" level. At the moment, companies everywhere are scrambling to get on the "Linux bandwagon". (Whether this is a good thing or not is orthogonal to this discussion :-)

    These companies generally need the following things:

    • High-level orientation to GNU/Linux and free software, and planning of a "Linux strategy" (I don't know what that means, but people seem to want one)
    • Technical consultants to help them implement whatever-it-is-they're-doing-with-Linux quickly (this is pretty common given the massive shortage of tech labour and Linux expertise in particular)
    • Training and support to get their own developers and other personnel up-to-speed and working with Linux instead of whatever-it-was-they-were-using-before.

    Coincidentally, this is exactly what Linuxcare does. In particular, see Dave Sifry's recent rebuttal to the Tim O'Reilly article on Linuxcare and open source business...

    (Disclaimer: I work for Linuxcare)

  • I think VCs == suits by definition, and Kleiner Perkins is one of the big VC firms, yes?

    Lots of tech folks (non-suits) have made money. If they decide to fund a start up that they havn't founded (in exchange for stock) that is suitless VC.

    So if you shop a start-up around, and, say, get Eric Raymond intrested in it, that doesn't make him a suit (I'm assuming you didn't think he was one anyway). If he is intrested enough in it to give you money in exchange for stock, and a say in how the compony is run, he still isn't a suit either, is he?

    It has happened before (not with Eric that I know of). I have no doubt that it will happen again.

    Granted most people who give venture capital are suits. But that isn't part of the definition.

  • I'm glad somebody said it (Score:4)

    by FascDot Killed My Pr ( 24021 ) on Tuesday May 23, 2000 @04:46AM (#1054164)
    "...nebulous 'knowledge center'..."

    And that's putting it kindly. I saw references (I don't remember where) to Linuxcare's vast storehouse of Linux-related problem resolutions and so I used it a couple of times. Total crap. I would guess that less than 10% of the top 5 items returned were on target. And that 10% seemed to be cut 'n' pasted from Usenet postings and mailing lists.

    An LC employee is quoted as calling the "knowledge center" a "simple search engine", but even that is giving the tool I used more credit than it deserves.
    --
    Have Exchange users? Want to run Linux? Can't afford OpenMail?
  • Three of my friends (excluding myself) use linux at home so you may be more misinformed on this point than you might think.

    Also, I had no idea that linux was being used on the Enterprise since it hasn't even been built yet. If that's not a plug for linux I don't know what is!!

    Since you have such great Federation connections, though, do you know where I might get some gagh?

    ooky
    Theyusedtocallmetrickykid/Ilivethelifetheywishthey did/IlivethelifeIownacar/Andnowtheycallm eSUPASTAR!!!
  • "The stock-market instability got to us," says Linuxcare's interim CEO Pat Lambs, who usually runs the firm's services unit.

    Such an irresponsible comment. As any student in business school will tell you, stock market prices reflect expected FUTURE economic value. They shouldn't blame the market for their poor business decisions or choice of management.
  • It is sad to see how a company with such potential as LinuxCare has hit rocky seas. Let us hope this is not a harbinger of things to come for open-source service companies.

  • Re:Get a life! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Why would anyone listen to Geeks in space?
  • I think the article makes a good point about Linuxcare being too soon into the support-only market. Right now, Linux is being used in a lot of shops in various roles, and it's usage can only grow. But I imagine at most places that do use Linux, they look for support from 3 sources:

    - Existing Unix/other guru's they may have on staff.

    - Hiring 1 or 2 new people to handle it for them.

    - Many distributors like RedHat and Caldera would like to sell you support options as well. If a business deals with Redhat, they're more likely to go to Redhat to get their support if they need it.

    Consider how this sort of thing working in the Windows world. Only in the past few of years did the concept of outsourcing your support needs to a major company become widely used. Before that, support was taken care of in-house. It's not unreasonable to think that Linux will go through a similar "in-house only" phase.

    Eventually, however, the proliferation of Linux on desktops and servers throughout the business world will reach a critical mass, where it will make sense for a business to hire someone like a Linuxcare to come in and save the day. Here's hoping companies like Linuxcare can survive the rough times and prosper later on.
  • Thank you for marking this as flamebait Mr Moderator out there.

    It is not the proper /. groupthink. I will adjust my thinking accordingly, so that I conform to the group. God forbid we have any opposing viewpoints.

    In fact, /. should just have buttons after each story where everyone clicks "I Agree", "Free Software Rules, etc..."

  • Any time there.. (Score:4)

    by tcd004 ( 134130 ) on Tuesday May 23, 2000 @04:39AM (#1054171) Homepage
    are opportunites to exploit a new economy, there are companies who jump in prematurely. I wouldn't be suprised if they go the way of the do-do. Just consider how many PC startups came and went in the 80's.

    tcd004

    Here is my Microsoft parody [lostbrain.com], where's yours?

  • it's relatively easy to get a group of skilled Linux people to do support, at least on a small scale. With easy entry and exit from the market, there's no real barrier to competition. Thus, in this industry, the tendency toward profit is ZERO. It has nothing to do with whether or not it's OSS.

    IMHO, with OSS is easier to find skilled people, because there is no way to artificially raise the entry barrier, as is often the case with close source operating systems or other software. The only limit anybody has in becoming expert of some OSS is its capability to understand the source.

    This is a VERY GOOD THING, and it goes to advantage of users. But, it also makes very difficult make money selling support, at least for large-scale companies.

    It's just an idea, but maybe franchising[sp?] whould work much better. Did anybody tried that?

  • I think that after the initial successes of RedHat, VA, and Andover stock, the media, like ZiffDavis, has taken a keen intrest in Open Source stocks... I just hope that Linuxcare's troubles won't bleed over to other companies.
  • How often to you see the name of a Nine Inch Nails album in a story about computers? This is my first time...
  • Yeah I agree, but I meant the *firms* not individual investors when I said "VCs == suits". Although (If we're taking ESR as an example) some investors are more individual than others (ahahahah couldn't resist). But seriously, I also think that there are serious capitalists out there who understand geekism; and while they are suits they are not bad suits. But, it seems that linuxcare did not find these people to be their execs and funding sources.
  • strange switch, from company to people. companies aren't people.

    //rdj

  • kt (Score:2)

    by wvw1 ( 146289 )
    I am going to miss kerneltraffic. But not linuxcare.
  • **WORKING** to get a job!? What a crock of shit! No wonder linuxcare is dying. If they would simply drive to my house, feed me treats, and carry me to a comfy new job at their place (and do this for all new employees), they surely would have had a multibillion dollar ipo. Damn those bad management decisions.
  • How many top 5 items are there in aggregate from 2 searches? 10. What's 10% of 10? 1.

    Math is easy when you actually think rather than try to flame blindly.
    --
    Have Exchange users? Want to run Linux? Can't afford OpenMail?
  • That's what happens when geeks run a company -- they forget about little technicalities like paying the bills in their insane quest for free "open source" solutions. LinuxOne suffered, pure and simple, from a surfeit of Quake-players and a dearth of those annoying, but often useful individuals, who you call ``suits''. Even though we favour smartly pressed Gap khakis these days.

    And now, from the article...

    While management gambled big on an IPO that didn't meterialize, a tense civil war seethed below Linuxcare's placid surface, pitting open-source purists against much of the CIO's staff.

    So, the CEO gambled on the IPO to cover for poor decisions that were made because he was gambling on the IPO, the CIO alienated the IT people by making obviously poor technology decisions[1], and the problem is with, to use your stereotype, the Quake-players[4]. Interesting logic.


    --
    1. With the engineering acumen Linuxcare has/had, outsourcing is ludicrous. Being in the business of open-source services, using a proprietary solution makes about as much sense as Microsoft using Apache to provide MSN homepages[2][5].
    2. D'oh. Umm... Err... Apple running Solaris on their web servers[3].
    3. D'oh. Never mind. I'm going home now. :-)
    4. To hell with Doom, I miss Zork.
    5. Yes, I know Microsoft using Apache to run their web services does make sense (which is presumably why it's happening). I was referring to the proprietary-open axis, not the scalability and/or stability axes.
  • Example for the slow:

    Search 1 returns 78 items. Of the top 5 on the list, 0 are on target.

    Search 2 returns 123 items. Of the top 5 on the list, 1 is on target.

    What's the running total for on target hits among the top 5? 10%. What's the running total for on target hits among the top 10? Well, 1 hit in a sample size of 20 is 5%.

    So to answer your question: "...wouldn't that be the top 10 items?"

    No.
    --
    Have Exchange users? Want to run Linux? Can't afford OpenMail?

  • A fiasco! (Score:4)

    by jd ( 1658 ) <imipak@yahoGINSBERGo.com minus poet> on Tuesday May 23, 2000 @05:29AM (#1054182) Homepage Journal
    Frankly, I am horrified by the way LinuxCare's management went about things. Planning? What's that? We're on a Get Rich Quick scheme! *SIGH*

    The only way to get rich, quickly or otherwise, is to put in the leg-work necessary. A fancy name, a few scraps of vaporware and egos that could fill a Black Hole aren't enough to do anything but look stupid.

    IMHO, 9 out of every 10 Slashdotters could have done better, with a tenth of the funding, on their own, over a weekend!

    If LinuxCare want to have a management team that could get the respect of employees and the markets, they should print out the Linux kernel CREDITS file and find the top 10% (karma-wise) posters on Slashdot. These are the people who understand what is involved, who have the skills to comprehend what is possible, and who could guide LinuxCare in that direction.

    (Most people who'd qualify, though, would probably turn their noses up. Anyone that smart would be, by definition, too smart to walk -onto- a sinking ship. If not, anyone want a job bailing water for the Titanic?)

  • I didn't see this link http://opensourceit.earthweb.com/tools/000518_sifr yint.html mentioned in the comments. Decent interview with Dave Sifry on the road ahead for Linuxcare.
  • Not surprisingly. Is easier to sell bottled water in a desert than close to a spring.
    Yes, you can start building acqueducts[sp?], starting a new line of business ... but I'm not sure if/how this is possible with OSS.

    One problem with selling support for OSS is that a small company of 30-or-so hackers with little or no management/marketing overhead can offer a better level of support than a big corporation, at least locally.

    In other words, I'm afraid that OSS does not scale well to big corporations.

    This maybe only a problem for Linux corporations, but where would be Linux without them? [I can use my winmodem on Linux because Lucent made it for RH ... ]

  • Well, given that I am ALSO the proud owner of an MBA, a degree in accounting and several "suits," I would think I would know something about business. Valuation is loosely defined as the net present value of expected future economic earnings.

    In other words: You have no value unless you can reasonably expect to make value (ie cash).

    When you are creating value, you have cash to pay bills. I would think that they would have at least hired a clerk to write the checks. When you don't have cash, you the clerk can't write the checks.

    Constant refinancing without the hope of maintaining a going concern is either stupid or illegal, depending on the circumstances.

    And what's wrong with Geeks running a company? Gates, Allen, Dell, Jobs, Wozniak and others have done a fairly good job of it.
  • The Julius port of the orrange drink is wonderfully tasty, especitally the way it pulls in the incautious and thirsty mallgoers.

    Oops, I think I hear someone drinking it now.

    Not George.
  • I disagree. Recruiting kernel hackers and Slashdot posters would net them some technical talent, but Linuxcare already has an abundance of that. What they're lacking is skilled managers and business leaders who could harness that talent and do something productive with it. Needless to say, those leaders would need to grasp the open-source concept and work well with the technical staff. But they wouldn't need to be (and probably shouldn't be) master-hackers in their own right.
  • I think to be a success in providing support for Linux, a company would need to provide the same advantages that Linux itself provides. Take advantage of the open source model. Their would be no problem to big. If a (big)customer calls and can't get the SCSI cards working in the 500 pc's they just rolled out...Then the "support" company rolls out the "experts" and tweaks some code in an existing SCSI module, or programs a new one....And the customer gets results....I think anyone could build a searchable knowledge base from USENET postings....But to be a success, you would have to offer services that are pretty much unatainable by your average user. (Anyone can go to google)...I have thought in the past with people trying to make money from a "free" product....that the only money would be in support -- and that support would have to be TOP notch....And day to day business practices from companies making money, would have to resolve around a culture of dark basements and caffiene rather than spiffy conference rooms, cell phones, and IPO's.

    IMHO
  • Damn. You remember the number of items your 2 searches returned? Wish I had that kinda memory power. You must be a psychic.
  • I've always liked the *idea* of linuxcare.
    The trouble with relying on a company like
    RedHat for support is that they're
    experts in only one linux distribution.
    If the correct solution to a problem is
    "Switch to Debian", you're not going to
    hear that from RedHat.

    And while their revenue was drowning in their
    loses, at least they *had* revenue (unlike many
    a dot com startup). Firing the insane suits
    that were throwing money away is pretty much
    all they've got to do to become profitable,
    and that's what they did.

    Too bad they're not publically traded already, or
    I'd say "buy".

  • Let me ask you this, do you think that there is a market for selling Apache support?

    Certainly. Plenty of unix-oriented consultants already do this sort of work.

    Selling support for Open Source Software doesn't work as an exclusive business model because unlike proprietary software most people who have jobs working with OSS have a clue

    That's a false premise. Many workplaces use linux, and have employees who couldn't fix a bug or even figure out how to compile a program using the machines. As linux grows, the numbers of these people will grow.

    lines, users of OSS can simply fix the code or ask on a newsgroup and get a faster and sometimes better response from some enterprising hacker than from some tech support flunkie.

    Good and rapidly supplied information is worth more than a newsgroup posting from a stranger.

    I see selling Linux support being like selling toys online, anyone can do it but the market will only support one or two major players while the rest will flounder and die.

    Umm..What sort of reasoning are you basing that on? Linux support is already done by many small companies in the computer consulting field. There is little competitive advantage to being large in this field; I don't see why a firm of 2000 consultants would have a greater profit margin (%) than a firm of 20 (The primary advantage of a company like IBM or Sun is name recognition, not size.) Overall, consulting is a highly competitive business with little room for poorly managed companies.

  • Yet Another Case of Extrapolating the Specific to the General
  • This post seems like a non-worthwhile, self-aggrandizing, pointless display of the lack of any apptitude what-so-ever. If this guy won't even thanksomeone for pointing out the fact that his company's URL is broken, then we should probably shut him edown...
    regards,
    Benjamin Carlson
  • Reality check: Is /. karma a function of technical talent?
  • No kidding, I went to the Madison concert and it's a toss up between them and manson for putting on the best show. Damn is all I gotta say
  • At least one of the problems that Linuxcare has had is the use of closed source technology (their CTO came from e*Trade, if I recall correctly, where he built a massive (and verrrrryyyy slow) electronic trading infrastructure entirely on Java and some other proprietary technologies. Linuxcare was always hindered by the use of closed technologies in its efforts.

    The other problems plague most start ups: growing too fast, no direction, wasting money. I had a friend who positively had to *work* to get hired by Linuxcare (and he was pretty qualified). They have been funding some open source projects but don't appear to have a theory of why. They have hired some famous people but with no particular rhyme or reason.

    Anyway, it should be interesting to continue watching them. I think they can pull it off, but it will not be easy.
  • "the article is relatively fair"??

    Can we assume CmrTaco feels any article that is pro Linux or doesn't bad mouth Linux is fair, and any article that sheds a negative light on Linux is unfair?

    Your an editor, report the news, dont decide for the /. lemmings what is and isn't fair.
  • In Spring of '99 they were at
    Linux Expo, where they gave away a new
    VW -- they need it now to get their people
    out to new job interviews. They also gave away
    "Linuxgruven" bumper stickers with a tipsy penguin -- are these worth
    anything? On e-bay?

  • Geeks vs. Suits (Score:4)

    by zorgon ( 66258 ) on Tuesday May 23, 2000 @04:59AM (#1054199) Homepage Journal
    I'm surprised nobody has commented on what appears to be the central theme of the article -- the whole geeks vs. suits dialectic is held responsible for the company's problems. According to the article: Rather than focusing on the technology, the high-powered excecutives brought in to make the company profitable in the competetive business community concentrated on personal perks (cell phones, parking spaces), and making money on the stock market. Would have done better if they'd left the geeks in charge for a while longer. IMHO Linuxcare need a Jobsian (Jobsesque? Gasseeoid?) suitgeek who at least has a love for the technology and a knack for the sales pitch. Remember what happened to Apple when the suits squeezed out the geeks from the top levels (okay flame me now, I'm gritting my teeth) -- same story here?
  • I have been thinking about the current marketing paradigm amongst OSS companies which is making software a commodity and then charging for support. The more I think about it, the more uncomfortable I feel. According to Open Source main proponent, ESR, Open Source is a superior engineering model than Closed Source and hence Open Source Software should be more reliable and stable than most Closed Source Software. This means that Open Source Software should need less support than Closed Source software. The upshot of this is that Open Source companies will never be as attractive to investors as closed source companies because closed source companies will always have larger profit margins, for instance, MSFT charges exorbitantly for it's software as well as for support (which is necessary with MSFT shitty software) while Red Hat charges only for support (which isn't necessary with a clueful admin or if one just reads USENET). Obviously even if they were the same size and sold the same amount of software MSFT would make more money and hence be more attractive to investors than RHAT which would eventually MSFT would grow larger than Red Hat. IMHO the recent downturn in Linux stocks seems to be based on this kind of reasoning especially since Linux stocks really became hot when it seemed like MSFT was not going to avoid being found guilty by the DOJ.

    For the above reasons I have very little faith in any Linux company or other OSS pure-play ever becoming a very dominant company or even surviving for very long. The MSFT Halloween documents got it right when they regarded the commoditization of software as a death knell. VA Linux has found this out the hard way, what it sells is a commodity (a free OS and PC hardware) and now that other PC makers (who have more money, better distribution channels, more marketers, etc) now sell Linux boxes it turns out that VA Linux can't sell more boxes than anyone except Fujitsu Siemens. Now back to OSS companies before I drift way offtopic, companies that sell commodity software aimed at a market of experts then expect to sell support need to have a large source of income in the first place to create a large, well developed support network. Unfortunately, since their only source of revenue is from support but yet has to pay for both development costs and support the chances of such infrastructure being put in place is slim.

    To make money from Open Source and become a successful company, a business needs to rely on more sources of income than support for software that is better engineered than its counterparts. Multiple revenue streams are required or else it is all for naught.

  • If you've got a problem, post it to Usenet or a listserver. Or e-mail the guy who wrote the SCSI driver in the first place!

    Go away, and come back when you've got a clue! That might be an appropriate solution for you or I, but to a company that's basing its business around Linux, it's clearly not. They need guaranteed response times, and that's where someone like Linuxcare comes in. Posting a request on a newsgroup, or emailing someone just isn't going to cut it.

  • I'm saying that LinuxCare was a stupid idea, by a bad company, poorly executed.

    I know nothing beyond the article, and I'm no Linux geek. Would it be fair to say that it was a bad company and poorly executed, but not a bad idea ?

    Does the collapse of boo.com mean that clothes retailing is a bad idea (even though it seems so contagious that the stock markets have caught a cold [ft.com] over it) ? We all knew there were some bad implementations and flakey companies out there, but it doesn't mean that the concepts are inherently broken. The dot.com bubble is much more like the American 1929 bubble over radio stocks, than the South Sea or Tulipomania, simply because there is a basic product under all that hype, and it's a product worth having. Radio recovered in the '30s, tulips didn't.

    Who uses these stupid "knowledge bases", anyways?

    I would.

    I know the Win32 / Web platforms, but I don't know Linux. Right now I have a bucket o'cash to spend on someone who will tell me how to do (secret server-based web-thing) over *nix, and it's better than M$oft's product. I don't want to spend my time on this, I just want to spend my commercial budget on keeping my commercial timescale on track. Answering my need here is a good and reasonably long-term business to be in.

    As I said, I know nothing of Linuxcare, but it sounds an awful lot like major pointy hair and yet another dot.com cash bonfire. Nothing new there....

  • Re:Geeks vs. Suits (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Inclined to agree!

    But they never really had a chance from the management viewpoint. Kleiner Perkins raped the original founders - they only had ~8% of the company left after KP's "funding". Add to that KP's abysmal choice of CEO and some of his abysmal hires, and things started to get ugly. It was agonising to watch because there was nothing the founders could do. They had no control any more!

    Sorry Linuxcare. Great idea. Try to be a bit more aware of control and funding next time though. You know who I mean.

    AC.

  • First of all, LinuxCare != LinuxOne.

    Second, your claim that "LinuxCare was a Ponzi scheme, it needed constant access to new investors, in order to pay its bills." is wrong in at least two ways.

    A) Ponzi's don't have any output. LinuxCare did and does have a product.

    B) Ponzi's are asymptotically increasing (meaning they just grow and grow, thus the vernacular "pyramid" scheme). LinuxCare was going to IPO just once and then run itself on that money + profits.

    Third, geeks didn't (and don't) run either LinuxCare. Did you read the article? The founders of LC hired "Fernand", a former IBM exec (not programmer), to run the company.
    --
    Have Exchange users? Want to run Linux? Can't afford OpenMail?

  • No flame from here. I think you have this dead on. This was a management problem.

    The real clue for me was the refusal to use Open Source products in their infrastructure. I can understand that if your product is open source but you feel that OS strategy is only useful in narrow situations. But linuxcare's whole business model depends on the proposition that OS is better. Those complaints the team raised about OS are pretty much right out of the NT complaints about linux.

    So while rushing to an IPO can be defended on a number of grounds, such as trying to facilitate rapid expansion, overconfidence about the company's capabilities, this objection seems to me to be indicative of something else. It looks like they were trying to ride a fad to completion, one they were actually quite skeptical about.

    Note that their partners are still quite enthusiastic about the company, despite its weaknesses.

    One lesson I've seen appear again and again is that a company is only a valuable as the sum total of its talent. This includes marketting and management talent, but by definition these are social people who usually take care of themselves. Some companies use CTO as the tech advocate to management. Others have people like Jobs. He puts more restrictions and demands on his people than anyone-- but his own skills are excellent, and let him do this.

    Reading Red Herring won't help you design a product anymore than watching Nascar will help you design a car. The revolution of last half of the 20th century is not that more jobs are becoming knowledge based, but that external demands and the vastly increased diversity, scope and depth of skills needed in business are turning management into 'just another skills job'.

  • Selling support for Open Source Software doesn't work as an exclusive business model because unlike proprietary software most people who have jobs working with OSS have a clue and they have the source or at least have access to people who have the source. This means that unlike IBM and MSFT who can rest assured that if there is a problem with their software their users will have to call their expensive support lines, users of OSS can simply fix the code or ask on a newsgroup and get a faster and sometimes better response from some enterprising hacker than from some tech support flunkie. But if linux is to take hold, shouldn't it be branching out into the market of (as people often call them here) lusers, where the real money is anyway? For example, my dad is an amazingly smart person, but he has no real interest in computers other than what they will do for him. If he runs into a problem, then he's not going to jump on the linux kernel mailing list or usenet to get answers, he's going to get pissed and call whomever he bought the software from, if the answer can't be found in the included documentation. Real people need structured software support, and I'm confidant in predicting they always will. I mean, even smart people won't know everything about everything!

    ooky
    "I'll take the rapists for $600, Alex!"
    "Um, that's Therapists, Mr. Connery."
  • So basically the companies who use GNU/Linux hire those self taught programmers who run GNU/Linux for years and who already know where and how to get this information. So what is Linux Care to do?

    Well this may be the case now, but Linux is gaining momentum quite quickly. Various entities are doing Linux training [including Linuxcare]. In looking at some of the Linux courses now available, many of them strike me as "Linux for Dummies" type classes. I'm sure most people reading slashdot know at least one person who is "trained" on Microsoft products but doesn't know what the hell they are doing. Pretty soon the people coming out of these Linux training classes will be in a similar situation.
    It is these people that Linuxcare wants to support. Unfortunately they may just be a little early yet.

    Ender

    DISCLAIMER: I am an MCSE... but I USUALLY [heh] know what I'm doing...which is why I'm trying to give up NT... anyone know of a 'patch' I can use in the interem [g]

  • Wish I had that kinda brain power.

    You said it, not me.
    --
    Have Exchange users? Want to run Linux? Can't afford OpenMail?
  • Maybe Karma is less a measure of technical knowledge than it is measure of effectiveness in communication. Which is going to be more important in an executive: the ability to debug a kernel, or the ability to communicate with employees, bosses, and the outside world?

    All the high-karma posters have at least one thing in common: they can communicate useful thoughts well. Maybe that's one point that that poster meant to make.

  • They're kinda pointless... if you can't read USENET, LDP, or a man page you shouldn't be running *nix anyway.
    [SNIP]
    but I still don't see the basic computer user running Linux as their desktop OS. At least not today...

    Do you see a contradiction here? Or perhaps your cause is mixed up with your effect. I think one thing LinuxCare could do...maybe could have done...is make it so it does NOT have to be that way, so that lusers like me could use a real OS, despite our lack of technical knowledge. Maybe it would even be good for the economy. How many people-hours have we lost due to MS stupidity and buggy software?

  • > Linuxcare is pointless because the tech support is out there all over the place.
    > The few people who need to be spoonfed w/ Linuxcare will get frustrated
    > with Linux and go back to Micro$oft.

    But who wrote that tech support info? Some of us are now working for Linuxcare. And trust me, the support calls/EMails from Linuxcare customers go straight to the top of my list.

    Say 99% of the time, your trouble is not some subtle kernel bug. It's nice to have someone to go to who can handle the other 1% as well.

    Rusty,
    Linuxcare Employee and Linux Netfilter Maintainer.
  • This means that unlike IBM and MSFT who can rest assured that if there is a problem with their software their users will have to call their expensive support lines, users of OSS can simply fix the code or ask on a newsgroup and get a faster and sometimes better response from some enterprising hacker than from some tech support flunkie

    Yeah, but can you bet your business on news group replies, which you may or may not get?
    I've asked enough questions on Usenet I didn't get any reaction to at all, and I've seen way too much "stop whining, fix it yourself" flames that I could comfortably rely on volunteer support via news groups or mailing lists.
    Sure, if a problem isn't critical, I too ask on a news group and try to figure out the solution myself, but when I really need something fixed yesterday, I'd rather have a service contract that guarantees me that my problem gets the appropriate attention. (depending on what service level I'm willing to pay for)

  • he's nowhere near as good as meept or OOG.

    DON'T MODERATE OOG!!

  • Re:Show me the money..... (Score:4)

    by streetlawyer ( 169828 ) on Tuesday May 23, 2000 @05:03AM (#1054214) Homepage
    As the proud owner of a Masters' in Business Administration, I feel able to tell you that you are wrong. Whatever stock prices may or may not reflect, and whatever the shortcomings of LinuxOne's management (a plagiarised SEC filing certainly suggests they may be manifold), the point made in your italicised sentence is by no means completely irrational. Given that LinuxOne is cash negative (has a positive burn rate), it depends (depended) for its survival as a company on the ability to refinance at regular intervals. This constant, repeated cash drain made it what has been called (by, eg, Hyman Minsky) a "Ponzi" project (one which cannot meet its interest bill without refinancing).

    Because LinuxCare was a Ponzi scheme, it needed constant access to new investors, in order to pay its bills. Therefore, the "stock-market instability" (ie, the unaccountable refusal of investors to throw good money after bad in this case, despite their willingness to do just that in the case of Red Hat et al) was indeed, a major factor in their downfall.

    That's what happens when geeks run a company -- they forget about little technicalities like paying the bills in their insane quest for free "open source" solutions. LinuxOne suffered, pure and simple, from a surfeit of Quake-players and a dearth of those annoying, but often useful individuals, who you call "suits". Even though we favour smartly pressed Gap khakis these days.

    --montoya

  • Hmm, let's think about this some more.

    Microsoft - "Pretty Hate Machine"
    LinuxPPC - "Broken"
    Debian/PPC - "Fixed"
    LinuxCare - "The Downward Spiral"
    LinuxOne - "Further Down the Spiral"
    xscreensaver - "The Perfect Drug"
    the Mac OS - "The Fragile"
    Amiga - "Into the Void"

    -mcc-baka
    i beat my machine, it's a part of me, it's inside of me
    i'm stuck in this dream, it's changing me, i am becoming
  • You can't have less than 20% of something if it's only divided into 5 parts, you know. Certainly not less than 10%.

  • they do know their stuff, though (Score:3)

    by matticus ( 93537 ) on Tuesday May 23, 2000 @05:06AM (#1054218) Homepage
    when i was talking to the LinuxCare guys at comdex, i was wearing a shirt with binary ASCII characters on the front, and the LinuxCare guys decoded it on the spot. they knew every question i asked them. i was fairly impressed-i would hate to see this kind of talent go down the drain.

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