 |
 |
 |
|
On the Clue Trail at Comdex 99: Day TwoLet's start at the end of the day, when Linux Journal hosted an award dinner for both the Penguin Playoff and Linux Journal Editors Choice Awards at GameWorks in Las Vegas. By definition all the winners were among the clueful. But perhaps the happiest were the Cygnus guys, whose company was just bought by more than two thirds of a billion dollars. These guys were already calling themselves Red Hat. Maybe money can buy love. The Cygnus Deal was Topic Number One at the Linux Business Expo. To me the price has the look of a nonrefusable offer. According to rumor, Red Hat has had a hard time making the acquisitions necessary to grow into the major player that the market bets it will become. It seems other Linux companies want to get rich the same way Red Hat did: with their own IPOs. Would a post-IPO Cygnus be worth $674 million? Probably not. Hence the deal. Of course, not everyone agrees. Earlier I had a long conversation with Bryan Sparks and Lyle Ball of Lineo, the embedded Linux spinoff of Caldera, the Linux company Bryan co-founded in 1994. These very conversational gentlemen are huge Cluetrain fans, and they clearly get how markets work. What they're doing to turn Linux into the bedrock (to coin a metaphor deeper than "platform") of embedded systems — such as the non-PC "appliances" that are the sudden conversational rage — is highly significant. These guys are equally far-out and down-to-earth. I really like their chances. The major high point of my day came, however, when I met Don Marti of VA Linux Systems. To borrow a RageBoy superlative, he is a Gonzo Marketer of the First Water. Talk about starting fires. Don is the guy who discovered the silly Unisys Patent on the .GIF compression algorithm and made a great fun stink about it. He was a prime mover behind Windows Refund Day (that looks like Don on the right in the picture, but it's VA's Chris DiBona, who edited another Editor's Choice Award from Linux Journal, for the book Open Sources), and created one of the Web's great memes: the operating system sucks-rules-o'meter. More than a Cluetrain fan, this guy is a brother. I wrote down three or four of the lines he just dropped in conversation, then forgot the sheet of paper back at the hotel. But here's one I do remember: "Now it's time to hack the real world and let other people write Web sites about it." Watch this space for more on the story. — Doc Searls
|
