Kleiner Perkins Invests in LinuxCare

An anonymous reader writes " It's official now. Kleiner Perkins has blessed the Linux movement. Nobody will ever be fired for deploying Linux. " Kleiner Perkins is one of the VCs behind Amazon and Netscape.

Re:There's a glowing reference

[Anonymous Coward]

Put it this way,
Amazon might not be the biggest moneymaker in the world right now, but how valuable will it be in 10 years when most people shop online? Most companies aren't profitable immediately. Amazon is actually setting themselves up very nicely by getting a lot of branding and name recognition right from the start. Amazon has made themselves synonomous with online shopping, so when online shopping gets big Amazon will get big too.

WayCool!

[Wolfrider]

--Maybe my company will start considering Linux as a potentially viable solution now...

Re:important!

[Chexum]

Well, the problem might be, that many of us is a loud Linux advocate, can smell the dirty tricks of MS from tousands feet below, but can't get a grip on politics/CIO/CEO/C*O business world.

I, for one, have never ever heard about Kleiner Perkins, but that might be because I'm living over the big pond :)

VC = ventura capital?

[andika]

Just want to make sure

---
disable your animated screen saver, it wasted your CPU time

Re:There's a glowing reference

[Duke of URL]

From what I understand, they're not loosing money on each sale, but rather spending alot of money on things like marketing and growth -spending more than they earn.

Re:There's a glowing reference

[deeny]

Why not? They made out like bandits. :)

What went IPO at $18 a share is now worth about 8x
that (it was higher).

Most relatively new companies don't show much of
a profit as their growth means they're investing
in infrastructure (like inventory).

_Deirdre

VC and free software

[tgeller]

A little story.

About a year ago, I was representing a company that does support for free software, and managed to get a meeting with a very famous Silicon Valley venture capitalist (who shall remain nameless). I asked them about the likelihood that VC would invest in free software, and they responded something to the effect of, "If there's no proprietary content, we can't see how a company could make enough money from the model to satisfy us."

I just sent them a "told you so" message. God, that feels good. :) :) :) God bless the Linux community for making it happen!

--Tom

Re:A quote from the article

[Athos]

Uh... the Beowulf system was $130,000 (as I read it). THe hundreds of thousands they COULD have saved on an NT solution is compared to the AIX solution that's $2M/3yrs.

I'm no fan of Micros~1, but this seems quite possible. The article rightly brings up the not-up-front cost of porting the code.

The phrasing of the article is odd, but parseable.

There's a glowing reference

[Gerund]

I'm not sure we should sing and dance about the endorsement of the Venture Capitalists behind Amazon. If I were a Venture Capitalist, I'd be pretty iffy about that company. Currently the best way to support amazon is to not shop there, since they still lose money on every sale.

Still, it's nice to see rich people supporting Linux