Stardate 20010823.2123 (On Screen): I think I just suffered from an overdose of irony. Larry Augustin, CEO of VA Linux, was virtually the New Economy poster child. His company was based chapter and verse on New Economy scripture, right down the line. And as shouldn't surprise anyone at this point, his company has been
hemorrhaging money as long as it has existed. It originally sold servers with Linux on it, but as a small company it couldn't compete with HP and Compaq and Dell due to their vastly greater economy of scale. As servers became a commodity, VA Linux's hardware couldn't offer anything to justify its greater cost, and sales plummeted. Recently they made the hard decision to
get out of that business entirely, and shut it down because they couldn't find a buyer. (Hardly surprising.) Which left them exactly what? Well, there was SourceForge, which doesn't bring in much revenue. There was Andover Networks, which also doesn't. And then there's the business of selling Linux -- and we all know just how successful
that has been, don't we? The entire remaining business consisted of trying to make money by giving things away, and even Larry has finally woken up to the fact that you can't make a profit that way.
But Larry is a resourceful person, and he has had a remarkably innovative idea: he's going to save the company by selling proprietary software!(Larry has invented Microsoft!) But not just any software, mind. He's going to sell the software which runs SourceForge, one of the largest repositories of open source software there is. In fact, this is going to become the core of the company's business, and they may change the company's name as an indication of that fact. I wonder what they'll be saying about this on SlashDot (which is owned by that selfsame VA Linux)? (discuss)
Update 20010824: And here is the Slashdot thread.
