SuSe and Compaq

[Marcel Kunath]

What to fuck!?

SuSE's stock? They are a private company. And who isn't laying off people
these days? I am pretty sure RedHat's announcement will come one day. The
economy is pretty sick out there. Hell the world economies are in bad shape.
Every US investor is bailing towards cash and its driving the currencies down.
The Australians are crying about how their banana leaves are close to being
worth banana leaves. I hear it every day from my ozzie friend.

Despite that I don't see companies like RedHat, SuSE or Turbo making much
money ever. I am becoming more and more contrarian with the idea of making
money from a distribution. I think Debian has the largest chance of survival
and being the lucky winner in the end.

I like SuSE's distro but heck its not producing much in revenue. I sure hope
for the sake of the main players that all the little ones die out because they
are diverting investor money from the ones that have the highest chance to
survive. In my mind it is time for IBM to buy RedHat, Compaq to buy SuSE,
Caldera to get into bed with Sun or something.

I am closely monitoring the situation in the markets out there and it ain't
pretty. RedHat promised over and over again to be in black this Fall. If they
are not then watch them die or be bought out. Investors are bailing big time
from anything tech.
Hell they are bailing big time from anything stock towards cash. No profit no
funding. No funding no distro. I lost a lot of money personally but I am not
really upset. I gave SuSE the advice to not go public or else face the carnage
the others are under. There is basically two options:

1. go public and go down big time and take thousands of small investors with
you.
2. stay private and go down and only take the private investors with you and
maybe turn SuSE into a non-profit organization. (I doubt this works because
there is not the community feeling like Debian has it.)

I don't think they realize this. People lost too much money to put any more
into this mess and lose more money.

All of this will show if box makers have a true interest in Linux because they
must chose to either develop Linux themselves or select Debian, once all the
commercial Linuces are gone.

Linux is like Yahoo. You can't increase your profit by raising prices for
something you used to give away for free. People will bail. People are very
upset SuSE charges 70 dollars for their pro version. I can't understand how
RedHat can get away with charging twice as much for their pro version. Debian
was always true to the Linux philosophy of keeping it low cost and high value.
No corporate interest, no chance of bankruptcy.

Ok my money rant is over,

mk


 > > > Yeah, Compaq
bought
DEC in 1998 (late '97?).  Compaq had been doing a lot > with RedHat both on
> the Intel and Alpha side, including SmartStart kits for RedHat for their
> servers.  That's what I found so
> surprising about their buy-in to SuSE.  But I guess after reading the
> article that it's maybe more of an
> industry bail-out/co-op thing, since SGI also bought in - all of this at a
> time when SuSE's stock is on a
> downturn and its US operations are laying people off.  Compaq may have
> simply decided that it wants
> to diversify its interests in the Linux market instead of putting all of
> its proverbial eggs in RedHat's
> basket.
>
> PaulM
>
>
>
> Doesn't Compaq own digital?  Perhaps there plans will change.
>
>
> Randy Keyes
> Network Services, JNL
> randall.keyes@jnli.com
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> On Thu, 15 Mar 2001 Paul_Melson@keykertusa.com wrote:
> >
> >      Do you have a URL?  I wonder if they're just bargain shopping (SuSE
> is
> > laying off and selling off this quarter)?
> >
> >
> >      Did it indicate whether they're looking at it for the Alpha or x86
> > platform servers?  I'd really like to see Compaq replace Tru64 (or at
> > least augment it) with Linux of some sort.
> >
>
>
>
> Digital had already made plans to to merge parts of Tru64 with Linux, but
> I thought they were doing it with Redhat.
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> linux-user mailing list
> linux-user@egr.msu.edu
> http://www.egr.msu.edu/mailman/listinfo/linux-user
>


--
Marcel Kunath

*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*

 Montie House Network            Greater Lansing Linux Users Group
  http://www.montiehouse.com      http://www.gllug.org

*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*