“The Canopy Group and Egan-Managed Capital, two of Lineo’s many investors, have been running a “notice of public sale” in a local Utah paper since April 8 apparently. It recalls the sheriff hammering a foreclosure sign on an Oklahoma farm with the butt-end of his gun during the dust storms of the Great Depression. As previously reported, Lineo has run out of money to the point of bouncing paychecks and having at least one of its offices padlocked by the landlord for want of the rent. Lineo has a pretty lustrous retinue of backers and burned through at least $65 million, maybe $20 million or $30 million more than that. It’s reportedly never been profitable.” Read the rest of the report at LinuxGram.
Lineo Goes To the Block
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Lineo is being run by a crook from California who has squandered all the money.
At least that is what I have heard from several friends who used to work there.
If a reputable company purchased Lineo I think it would be very profitable for them.
RedHat, in their latest conference call, told analysts that their embedded division is down to about a couple of people.
IBM lawyers wouldn’t allow their S/390 guys to use embedded linux on their commercial hardware:
“Most recently we wanted to make good use of Linux, because we wanted to ship some hardware where we said we would put a little operating system kernel into the hardware. This should enable us to do the initial program load specifically of Linux on top it of the small kernel. Flexible from different targets – CD-ROM, network or whatever. The first idea to take Linux was abendend. We didn’t want to do a distribution, because we didn’t want a patent infringement being detected. If somebody would have taken us to court we might have had to stop shipping our product. This is silly, so we simply decided to put a little proprietary kernel into the product. That was less risky.”
http://www.sslug.dk/patent/strassemeyer/transr-del.shtml
Hey, IBM will pay Lineo a little bit of money to port linux to their PowerPC-based set-top boxes development kits. If a start-up is stupid enough to use embedded linux on IBM’s PowerPC-based set-top boxes and then later found out later that they must release the source code — that’s too bad for the start-up, but IBM already pocketed their money when they bought a bunch of PowerPC boards.
Meanwhile, IBM’s corporate-wide policy is to not use embedded linux on their own commercial projects (IBM’s preferred embedded OS provider is QNX). The netvista thin clients in the cruise ships — QNX is the OS. The Chrysler telematics system — QNX OS/IBM java/motorola PowerPC board.
and in this case QNX is better since it is focused on that and has a licence suitable for IBM needs.
Linux and GNU isn’t for everything
RedHat, in their latest conference call, told analysts that their embedded division is down to about a couple of people.
Mike Tiemann also mentioned that their next big ‘push’ is in the embedded space now that their enterprise business is thriving.
IBM lawyers wouldn’t allow their S/390 guys to use embedded linux on their commercial hardware
Uh, you or someone has posted this before. First of all it wasn’t the “S/390 guys” wanting to use it for embedded projects – the S/390 is about as far from being embedded as you can possibly get.
Hey, IBM will pay Lineo a little bit of money to port linux to their PowerPC-based set-top boxes development kits.
Uh, I hate to break this to you, but at the end of Jan this year, IBM signed an agreement with Montavista (yet another embedded linux vendor) to port their embedded Linux platform to IBM’s various embedded PPC variants. IBM also took an equity stake in Montavista.
“embedded linux is dead” couldn’t be further from the true. Hey, watch out for the upcomming Evans Data Group survey. It’ll be a nasty shock for you.
RedHat can’t be thriving if they are losing $140 million last year. Conference call is a sales pitch — trying to convince institutional investors to buy their stocks — remember the very small fine print of forwarding looking… He also mentioned that the push would be several years from now.
My wording of “S/390 guys” is just that —- the guys who ported Linux to the S/390 platform. Whether the actual hardware is related to S/390 hardware, I am not sure — what I am sure from that interview I posted is that it’s the same IBM guy.
Yeah, precisely. It’s your start-up’s problem if you find out that you have to release the source code on your embedded project. But for the IBM hardware divisions, if customers want embedded DOS on their set-tops (embedded DOS is actually very popular in set-tops) then they would find a company to port DOS to powerpc’s set-top dev. kits.
IBM invests in these companies (montavista, lineo) for PR purposes and insurance purposes (just in case embedded linux may actually work). So what’s the significance of Intel investing in Be Inc. — it’s just an extra market to sell intel chips. But day in and day out, it’s QNX that’s in the netvistas and chrsyler’s telematics systems.
Consulting firms issue a lot of bad stuff. Just like Wall Street research, it’s self serving. And most people use outdated data anyway. Most people remember HomeDepot switching to embedded linux Point-of-Sales systems. Guess what nobody reported HomeDepot droping their linux projects. Last year, consulting firms targeted linux POS would grow from 2% to 6& of the market in 2002. This year, the same consulting firms are saying the figure for linux POS in 2002 is likely to be stuck at 2%. If Evans Data Group are right, we would be swimming in internet applicances right now.
RedHat can’t be thriving if they are losing $140 million last year.
RedHat are thriving, but I haven’t got the motivation to explain basic business planning and accountancy to you so I’ll just leave it at that. You’re free to draw you own conclusions no matter how wrong they are.
It’s your start-up’s problem if you find out that you have to release the source code on your embedded project.
Lets entertain this delusional thought for a moment. Would you care to explain why using an embedded Linux kernel would require you to open your own proprietary code?
Make sure you read the relevant licenses very carefully because we’ve heard the woolly microsoftie anti GPL cr*p before.
Consulting firms issue a lot of bad stuff. Just like Wall Street research, it’s self serving.
Ah, the usual “their conclusions don’t match mine, therefore they have to be wrong” response. I’d actually expected something a little more original.
Most people remember HomeDepot switching to embedded linux Point-of-Sales systems. Guess what nobody reported HomeDepot droping their linux projects.
The HomeDepot Linux POS system was dropped for political reasons, not because of any technical deficiency – and Linux POS deployment still grew 80% last year. Furthermore, the rate of change in the POS market is extremely small – you don’t rip out what is quite possibly your most business critical system on a mere whim.
Last year, consulting firms targeted linux POS would grow from 2% to 6& of the market in 2002. This year, the same consulting firms are saying the figure for linux POS in 2002 is likely to be stuck at 2%. If Evans Data Group are right, we would be swimming in internet applicances right now.
The methology behind the Evans Data Group reports is actually reasonably sound. I guess you’ll just have to wait for a couple of weeks for the next update. Suffice to say you still haven’t presented any convincing evidence to show how embedded linux is ‘dead’
Even if you use the most liberal RedHat’s earnings numbers, it “made” $1 million. RedHat has $300 million in the bank. If I put all $300 million into U.S. government treasury bonds — today’s yield is 4.875% for a 10 year yankee bond — I would have made more than $14.625 million in interest income. That means even if you use the most liberal RedHat’s earning numbers, they “made” a profit purely on that fact that they are earning income from the $300 million in the bank, not their linux business.
Not my position that embedding GPL linux on hardware is problematic — it’s IBM’s lawyers’ position. Actions speak much louder than words (or FUD or whatever you called it), the fact remains that the biggest linux embracing cheerleader, IBM, would not let their own people embedding linux into their hardware. We are not talking about Microsoft FUD, we are talking about IBM corporate policy of not deploying embedded linux.
In terms of HomeDepot, it might not be political reasons nor technical reasons. It may just be financial reasons, may be HomeDepot is just like the rest of retail industry in not adopting embedded linux because of questionable costs savings.
The methodology that Evans Data Corp used might be just perfectly fine (although with only 500 samples, the margin of errors is quite high), but the point is that the devil is in the details. Evans noted that 45% of the sampling data are expected to target embedded linux in the upcoming year. But they also noted that some 15% of the developers reported that they never finished 25%-50% of their projects and that 41% of the developers reported that they never finished up to 25% of their projects. Evans noted a lot of things, but the media never looks at the fine print.
In Texas several people have been put behind bars for 99 years !
Their crime ? Stealing a few items from a convenience store.
Then people talk about a company that has ‘never turned a profit’ as a company that is ‘losing money’.
Its theft – dressed in fancy financial jargon !