Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution
by Glyn Moody · 14 Jul 2002 · 483pp · 145,225 words
and the financial markets during 1998 and 1999. Another was the GNU/Linux hardware company VA Research, which changed its name to VA Linux in April 1999. Like Red Hat, VA Linux was plucked from its relative obscurity by an investment, announced on 12 November 1998, this time from Sequoia Capital, which had helped
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propel companies such as Yahoo to the next level. Intel then added its blessing to VA Linux with an investment on 19 February 1999. VA Linux’s IPO took place on 9 December 1999. The shares opened at $30 and closed at $239.25, an increase of
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an initial public offering. True to their countercultural origins, and recognizing the open source community’s critical role in their success, Red Hat, Caldera and VA Linux arranged for hackers who had contributed to GNU/Linux to be allocated shares at their opening price, in what were called directed-share schemes. Unfortunately
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a result of these IPOs would corrupt the hitherto unspoiled world of open source. Eric Raymond, himself the recipient of no less than 150,000 VA Linux shares in return for his services on the board of that company as what he calls “VA’s official corporate conscience,” was not one of
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pieces, called “Surprised by wealth,” a by-now familiar commingling of personal history and astute industry analysis, he described how he had found out about VA Linux’s stunning entrance on the stock exchange. It begins with a classic Raymondism: “A few hours ago, I learned that I am now (at least
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also freely available—was by no means a new one, even if it was only in 1999 that such high flyers as Red Hat and VA Linux brought the model to the attention of a bemused general public. One of the first people to make money from free software was Richard Stallman
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such as the Hungarian, Ingo Molnar. The other company that has built up an impressive portfolio of big names in the open source world is VA Linux. Top figures associated with the company include Ted Ts’o, Eric Raymond, and Jon “maddog” Hall. Given the parallels between Cygnus and the GNU/Linux
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a different kind of scarcity: the skills of the people who write and service that software. This also explains in part why Red Hat and VA Linux have been prepared to offer such flexible contracts to the top hackers, many of whom work from home, often outside the United States. Just as
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for small little bug fixes; it was designed for the bigger problems, the ones that are keeping bigger projects from getting to the next level.” VA Linux is another company that hopes to provide employment for hackers, promote free software, and make money in the process. Although initially formed to put together
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providing the best hardware and systems to run Linux, particularly for those people building Internet sites,” says Larry Augustin, CEO of VA Linux. As well as selling the basic hardware and software, VA Linux is also in the business of providing custom solutions, and in a novel way. “The idea is that the Internet
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one of the community’s key resources. “There’s a site on the Internet called Freshmeat, where open source software projects are announced,” he explains. VA Linux acquired Freshmeat when it bought the parent company, Andover.net, in February 2000. At that time, there were around fifty new free software projects announced
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deleted—all versions forever. So I came up with this idea of a site that I called ColdStorage; this was meant to go with Freshmeat.” VA Linux started building ColdStorage in 1998, at the same time it was working on another idea, called OpenProjects. The idea behind OpenProjects was to provide hackers
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, including many of the most important, and over 1 Terabyte—a million Mbytes—of free software. Though born in part of the business model of VA Linux, the appearance of SourceForge represents a large boost for the open source community. It provides both a historical repository of code—allowing people to track
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Cox in the Linux world. Allison has had a wide-ranging career, including stints as a software engineer at Sun, Cygnus, SGI and, most recently, VA Linux. His open source credentials are impeccable. In the late 1980s, he came up with a patch to GCC, which he sent off to Richard Stallman
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that this was the 64-bit version of the venerable Intel x86 family. GNU/Linux took an early lead here thanks to the efforts of VA Linux’s Larry Augustin. He approached Intel with the idea of porting GNU/Linux to the IA-64 platform because he had noted how traditionally the
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in the server space, and was not doing a good job of it. They saw in Linux an opportunity to do that.” The agreement for VA Linux to lead the port of GNU/Linux to the IA-64 was announced on 2 March 1999. Other companies mentioned in the press release as
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other Slashdot effect of creating a powerful distributed news gathering and filtering machine that is independent of the ordinary media companies (Slashdot is owned by VA Linux). Slashdot is a highly visible example of where the open source philosophy challenges the traditional structures of information, especially economic and legal, and its dissemination
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-financed violator. As Moglen says, “Our advantage from the great elopement of Wall Street with anarchism” in 1999, when companies such as Red Hat and VA Linux enjoyed highly successful IPOs, is “that . . . some money [is] lying around that can be used for these purposes.” But only “within limits,” he adds, and
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slashed and additional funding evaporate, and several have shut down completely. Few have fallen further than the brightest star in the open source IPO firmament, VA Linux. Not only was the company shunned by investors because of its free software affiliation, but its sales collapsed as many of its best customers—the
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Internet start-ups—were themselves wiped out in the dot-com crash. As a result, on 20 February 2001, VA Linux announced a bigger-thanexpected loss and cut 25 percent of its workforce. But even such major reductions were insufficient to address the scale of the
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problem, which became clear when VA Linux announced its third-quarter results in May. For 2000, sales for the third quarter had totaled $34.6 million; in 2001, they were just $20
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.3 million for the same three-month period. This devastating fall in revenues prompted the dramatic announcement on 27 June 2001 that VA Linux’s new strategic focus would be exclusively on software—a sad end for perhaps the first, and certainly the preeminent, dedicated open source hardware company
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. VA Linux’s failure was not a signal that open source was merely a fad whose time had passed. Rather, GNU/Linux’s growing success caused the
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as IBM, HP, Compaq, and Dell became more expert at offering systems tuned for GNU/Linux, so the need for a specialist company such as VA Linux declined. Another company that ended up far from its origins is John Ousterhout’s Ajuba Solutions, which began by building Tcl programming tools. The coding
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and Helix Code (company) and Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) and Linux source code and Mindcraft (company) and proprietary software and source code and SourceXchange and VA Linux contributions to Linux by employment of management of Hackers (the book) Hahn, Eric Hall, Jon Harnois, Michael Hecker, Frank Helix Code (company) Helsinki (Finland) Henkel
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/390 mainframes Image manipulation India Informix Infoworld Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) and Caldera (company) hackers and and Pacific HiTech and Red Hat and SuSE and VA Linux see also Venture capital Intel 80386 processor and development of Linux and Red Hat (company) Itanium chip (IA–64) Internet and Sendmail, Inc. and source
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, Glenn Le Duke, Dave Le Marois, Jacques Lemmke, Ari Levy, Steven Licenses see Copyright Lieber, Derek LiGNUx Lineo (company) Linux see GNU/Linux see also VA Linux Linuxcare (company) Linux Journal Linux Kernel Version History Linux Network Administrator’s Guide Linux News Linux Today Lisp (List Processing) Machine Incorporated (LMI) Literate Programming
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Mozilla and Freshmeat (Web site) and Mosaic and Netscape and Open Source Solutions Operation (OSSO) and Red Hat (company) and SAP and SourceForge (website) and VA Linux see also Open source code SourceForge (Web site) SourceXchange Sparks, Bryan Spyglass (company) Stallman, Richard and code-forking and Cygnus and Open Source Definition and
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) and X license at University of California at Berkeley development of fragmentation of and problems with newsletters programming Sun Microsystems and version 7 Uytterhoeven, Geert VA Linux and ColdStorage (website) and Intel Itanium chip (IA–64) and OpenProjects (website) and Slashdot.org and SourceForge (website) employment of hackers by see also VA
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Research Valloppillil, Vinod van Kempen, Fred van Rossum, Guido VA Research see also VA Linux Vaughan-Nichols, Steven J. Venture capital see also Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) Vera, James Vger Virtual Memory (VM) Visix (computer program) Visual Basic Vixie, Paul
Free as in Freedom
by Sam Williams · 16 Nov 2015
source" term. By August of 1999, Red Hat, a company that now eagerly billed itself as "open source," was selling shares on Nasdaq. In December, VA Linux-formerly VA Research-was floating its own IPO to historical effect. Opening at $30 per share, the company's stock price exploded past the $300
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Nasdaq record. Among those lucky shareholders was Eric Raymond, who, as a company board member since the Mozilla launch, had received 150,000 shares of VA Linux stock. Stunned by the realization that his essay contrasting the Stallman-Torvalds managerial styles had netted him $36 million in potential wealth, Raymond penned a
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, is Stallman. In an effort to drive that image home, Moglen reflects on a shared moment in the spring of 2000. The success of the VA Linux IPO was still resonating in the business media, and a half dozen free software-related issues were swimming through the news. Surrounded by a swirling
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. Stallman. The interview went well, so well that Slashdot (http://www.slashdot.org/), the popular "news for nerds" site owned by VA Software, Inc. (formerly VA Linux Systems and before that, VA Research), gave it a link in its daily list of feature stories. Within hours, the web servers at BeOpen were
The Intelligent Investor (Collins Business Essentials)
by Benjamin Graham and Jason Zweig · 1 Jan 1949 · 670pp · 194,502 words
underperformed the market by more than 23 percentage points annually.9 Perhaps no stock personifies the pipe dream of getting rich from IPOs better than VA Linux. “LNUX THE NEXT MSFT,” exulted an early owner; “BUY NOW, AND RETIRE IN FIVE YEARS FROM NOW.”10 On December 9, 1999, the stock was
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public offering price of $30. But demand for the shares was so ferocious that when NASDAQ opened that morning, none of the initial owners of VA Linux would let go of any shares until the price hit $299. The stock peaked at $320 and closed at $239.25, a gain of 697
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should buy only if the stock is a cheap way to own a desirable business. At the peak price on day one, investors were valuing VA Linux’s shares at a total of $12.7 billion. What was the company’s business worth? Less than five years old
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cumulative total of $44 million worth of its software and services—but had lost $25 million in the process. In its most recent fiscal quarter, VA Linux had generated $15 million in sales but had lost $10 million on them. This business, then, was losing almost 70 cents on every dollar it
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took in. VA Linux’s accumulated deficit (the amount by which its total expenses had exceeded its income) was $30 million. If VA Linux were a private company owned by the guy who lives next door, and he leaned over
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it matter what the business is worth? This chart shows why it matters. FIGURE 6-2 The Legend of VA Linux After going up like a bottle rocket on that first day of trading, VA Linux came down like a buttered brick. By December 9, 2002, three years to the day after the stock
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was at $239.50, VA Linux closed at $1.19 per share. Weighing the evidence objectively, the intelligent investor should conclude that IPO does not stand only for “initial public offering.”
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. Treasury U.S. Treasury bonds U.S. Treasury certificates U.S. treasury securities U.S. Utilities Sector Index Fund USA Interactive USG Corp. UST Inc. VA Linux Value Line (investment service) value/valuation: and advice; and aggressive investors; and bargains; Buffet’s comments about; business vs. stock-market; and dealings with brokerage
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http://welch.som.yale. edu/, are gold mines of data for anyone interested in IPOs. 10 Message no. 9, posted by “GoldFingers 69,” on the VA Linux (LNUX) message board at messages.yahoo.com, dated December 16, 1999. MSFT is the ticker symbol for Microsoft Corp. * As already noted (see p. 96
Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy
by Lawrence Lessig · 2 Jan 2009
Hat,5 and both Red Hat and 80706 i-xxiv 001-328 r4nk.indd 183 8/12/08 1:55:37 AM 184 REMI X VA Linux Systems gave stock options to Linus Torvalds.6 Many from the GNU/Linux community helped Red Hat understand what appropriate behavior was, and the company
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, by telephone. 5. Red Hat employed 50 percent of Linux’s core team. Telephone interview with Robert Young, April 26, 2007. 6. Red Hat and VA Linux gave stock options to Torvalds. Wikipedia contributors, “Linus Torvalds,” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, available at link #93 (Last visited July 31, 2007); Gary Rivlin, “Leader
WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us
by Tim O'Reilly · 9 Oct 2017 · 561pp · 157,589 words
by Christine Peterson of the Foresight Institute, a nanotechnology think tank, at a meeting convened by Larry Augustin, the CEO of a Linux company called VA Linux Systems. Eric and another software developer and free software activist, Bruce Perens, had been so excited about Christine’s new term that they had formed
Principles of Corporate Finance
by Richard A. Brealey, Stewart C. Myers and Franklin Allen · 15 Feb 2014
goes wrong, the underwriters may be blamed for overhyping the issue and failing in their “due diligence.” For example, in December 1999 the software company Va Linux went public at $30 a share. The next day trading opened at $299 a share, but then the price began to sag. Within two years
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it had fallen below $2. Disgruntled Va Linux investors sued the underwriters, complaining that the prospectus was “materially false.” These underwriters had plenty of company, for following the collapse of the dot.com
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of the 7% Plus Contract,” Journal of Financial Economics 59 (2001) pp. 313–346. 22It does not, however, hold the record. That honor goes to VA Linux. 23Our figure is an equally weighted average of first-day returns and is calculated from data on bear.cba.ufl.edu/ritter. As we saw
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United Technologies, 806 Universal Orlando, 848 Unlevering beta, 492–493, 494n Unlimited liability, 592 Unocal, 821 US Airways Group, Inc., 5n V Vale, 3, 827 Va Linux, 380, 381n Valuation of abandonment option, 569 annuity. See Annuities bond. See Bond valuation business. See Business valuation process by certainty equivalents, 232–233 by
The Art of Community: Building the New Age of Participation
by Jono Bacon · 1 Aug 2009 · 394pp · 110,352 words
in Nortel’s cafeteria, where individuals demonstrated various open source applications and Linux distributions. A few of the early open source-focused companies such as VA Linux and LinuxCare sent representatives as well, but the focus was mostly on Linux users showing one another projects we were interested or involved in. How
Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software
by Scott Rosenberg · 2 Jan 2006 · 394pp · 118,929 words
market craze in the spring of 2000, Linux had experienced its own mini-bubble, and a number of open source companies, including Red Hat and VA Linux, had gone public. Open source stocks fared no better than any other technology investments during the dot-com wipeout that followed. But the corporations of
Why Stock Markets Crash: Critical Events in Complex Financial Systems
by Didier Sornette · 18 Nov 2002 · 442pp · 39,064 words
companies is that their price–earning ratios (P/Es), and even more so their price–dividend ratios, often come in three digits. Some, such as VA LINUX, actually have a negative earning/share (of −168). Yet they finan cial crashe s : w h a t, w h y, a n d
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companies have been followed by a mad frenzy, where the share price has soared during the first few hours of trading. An excellent example is VA LINUX SYSTEMS whose $30 IPO price increased a record 697% to close at $23925 on its finan cial crashe s : w h a t, w
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their P/Es, and even more so their price-over-dividend ratios, often came in three digits prior to the crash. Some companies, such as VA LINUX, actually had a negative earnings/share of −168. Yet they were traded around $40 per share, which is close to the price of Ford
Joel on Software
by Joel Spolsky · 1 Aug 2004 · 370pp · 105,085 words
'm concerned. Open source is not exempt from the laws of gravity or economics. We saw this with Eazel, ArsDigita, The Company Formerly Known as VA Linux, and a lot of other attempts. But something is still going on that very few people in the open source world really understand: a lot
Panderer to Power
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