Love Says Caldera's Doing Fine, Despite Losses

sanpitch writes: "Caldera is barely scraping along, (in contrast to little brother Lineo, which may not survive). Their latest move is to close the Chelmsford and Erlangen offices, as well as lay off 73." At least not Noel Coward writes: "The bad financial report out of Caldera yesterday is actually good news, says Ransom Love in an interview on Linux and Main. Now, he says, they're ready to go forward with their grand strategy, which unfortunately has nothing at all to do with desktop Linux as we know it."

If that's the way, So Long

[cigarky]

Ransom and Caldera have always been rather "offbeat" members of the Linux community. I see no problems with them further withdrawing from the community into the proprietary software world - which is where I think Love is planning to take them. This recent spate of business "writing off" or "taking" losses is in part due to the Enron scandal. No company wants to be seen as hiding losses which might be discovered by the SEC, plantiff lawyers for shareholders' lawsuits, etc.. So no surprise as many other companies are rushing to confess losses.

Re:Why all the negative comments about Caldera?

[Billly Gates]

Try per seat licensing. THey are charging an arm and a leg for a so called free operating system and all there unix apps are proprietary. Ransom Love at one time believed in opensource. This was right before he purchased sco. Appearently the sco employees convinced him otherwise. Also not to mention they were supposed to opensource unix and make a low cost distro based on the real thing. He paniced at the last minute and just released some very old 1970's source under a restricted license. He then stated some nasty comments about linux and agreed with Microsoft that the gpl was VIRAL! Ouch. This guy should keep his mouth shut and step down. If I was an investor I would of tried to get this guy canned along time ago but now its too late. In other words you get alot more for less money under any other distro and you do not have a draconian EULA. Think about it. The whole reason Linux even exists is that users were tired of paying for and living under oppressive EULA's of proprietary operating systems. What caldera did was get linux, then try to make it as bad as Windows. I can trust RedHat a hell of alot more then Caldera.

This is a shame because my distro was caldera openlinux lite version 1.1. Those days are long over and its time for caldera to go. May they rest in peace.

Re:sad....

[x mani x]

Your points would all be valid if Linux was primarily a desktop OS, like MacOS 9 or Windows 9x.

The truth is, not many people aside from enthusiasts, students, software developers or sysadmins use Linux on the desktop. I personally always used to develop software on Linux since 1996. I recently switched to using Windows XP with Cygwin, using XEmacs/Win and the MSVC++ 6.0 debugger as my development environment. (IMHO!!) It beats using XEmacs and ddd (or gdb) hands down.

All that aside, walk into any server room and you'll see Linux _everywhere_. Admins can set up servers to their heart's content without having to worry about getting audited for it. Most IT managers by now have realized the TCO advantage of going with Linux/*BSD, and if they don't go Linux/*BSD its because general cluelessness (this is a major problem among IT managers) of political reasons.

For smaller shops going for a Dell or IBM Linux server is almost a no-brainer. For bigger Sun Enterprise-using shops, they're phasing out their older servers with these shiny Dell and IBM rackmounts as well. While Sunfire servers are still pretty much unmatched, IBM's Linux on Big Iron hardware must be scaring the shit out of Sun.

All this is just the tip of the iceberg, in my opinion. I haven't even mentioned how fast Linux servers are quietly eroding MS Exchange and MS file/print serving marketshare.

So, yes, Linux is years behind in terms of desktop useability ... but the truth is not many people really care. The server market is where the real money is at, anyway.