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Caldera against the wall: C|net

Thu, 09/06/2001 - 21:58 — charlie.collins

Caldera. Linux distro proprietors and owners of SCO and a few other ventures are in serious trouble. Competition and the current marketplace are blamed for the woes, but any way you look at it, they are in serious trouble. Another Linux company on the way out?

WIth the other news this year and Greatbridge today its not hard to see a serious trend that is disconcerting. Making money selling free stuff isnt working. Linux, postgres, etc are FREE, these companies have to sell services and extensions and that is proving to be innordinately difficult. People dont buy the supported version of a free program (for many reasons, it costs money to buy it and ususally the free support is better than the paid for support.) Open source itslef is a HUGE success, more and more companies are using it in for all kinds of tasks, but major vendors are not getting paid. Consultants and services, the money is there, not in the software itself. And selling services is tricky too. The economy itself is not to blame, this is a tough game and at the end of the day you have to be offering somethign that people will pay for, its thats simple and people dont pay for stuff they can get for free.

Check the c|net article for Caldera specifics.   Caldera against the wall: C

Comments

Fri, 09/07/2001 - 07:40 — jeepmutt (not verified)

Re: Caldera against the wall: C|net

Warning, this is slightly rant-y, and all over the place!

Gonna go out on a limb here. A limb that is dead and rotten that is connected to a tree that is precariously attached to a crumbling cliff face over a rock laden surf with 25 foot breakers and hungry sharks playing tag.

Ready?

OSS is never going to work as a business model. Just don't see it happenning. Sure businesses may use OSS software, they may even contribute back to it. But no-one, and I mean no-one is going to make it just selling services based on OSS. The biggest reason is of course, like atrox said, it's free. Free. FREE. The whole point of using something that is FREE is that it costs less. Even I grasp this simple economic concept.

One more thing. The FREE that companies, and even private citizens, care about is FREE as in BEER. The fact of the matter is, the FREE as in SPEECH aspects of OSS don't matter a hill of beans to the vast, vast majority of the end users. Take Java for instance. Not FREE speech, FREE beer, so we like it. (Actually from what I understand the hard core OSS/FSF people don't like java, but who really counts them?)

People taken as one big whole don't give a flying fig about the Free speech aspects of Linux or PostGreSQL or anything else, they are cheap bastards who don't want to pay for something. They want something for free. TANSTAAFL people. You do in fact get what you pay for. To say that OSS service is better than paid for services is pretty ludicrous. Yeah, you can find some OSS group that is more service-ful than some private group. But to cast a generic blanket statement such as OSS support is usually better than Paid-For support is seriously misunderestimating audience size. It's pretty easy for OpenJoe to support the 100 or so people that use his XFoo app, it is quite different to have a call-center that has to handle 1000s of calls a day, most of whom are made by idiots who can't figure out how their 'cup-holder' works.

Anyway, OSS won't work as a business model. Ever. I'll bet a shiny new quarter on it to the first taker. (And I don't mean one company making it, I mean it is a practical choice that a company can make and profit from.)

One more thing. I think that you should be able to patent/trademark/copyright/whatever software. Whadya think of that?

Sat, 09/08/2001 - 00:30 — Rich Carlsson (not verified)

Re: Caldera against the wall: C|net

I think you're absolutely right.

ME TOO! ME TOO! ME TOO!

I am an 'end user.' I don't code. I maybe could if I wanted to, but I'm lazy, and a tradesman, so I don't. I use Linux because it's free, partly. With the amount of software that comes included with hardware these days, that's hardly an issue for me. I use free software because I like it better than the stuff that came with my computer when I bought it.

As far as Linux or 'free' (in any sense) software being a money maker; well, it can't be. How can you make money selling something that the guy down the street is giving away for free. Unless you offer better service and, well, make it more convienent. And brand names don't hurt. Case in point: I'll spend $6.05 for a pack of smokes at the local Mac's Milk (I'm Canadian, sorry.) that's three minutes away from my house instead of walking that extra hundred feet to the gas station where'd I have to spend $5.50 for the same thing.

Convience is everything to the mass market. Microsoft is conveinent. (sp) (I'm drunk) Commercial software is convient. However you spell it. Companies that offer an otherwise free product with some sort of support cannot hope to make any money, when the masses who use the product feel guilted (is that a word? Again, I'm drunk) into offering free support for the same thing.

The software offered by the FSF or whatever you call it may be enterprise ready, I'm really not in a position to say, but no one can hope to make a buck selling free stuff. Marketing themselves as periphery companies that support the software might work, but selling the software itself cannot.

But what the hell do I know, I'm just a first year apprentice. :)

Richard.

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