LinuxOne Wastes Investors' Time, Money

RedHat employ some of the Linux community's top minds (Alan Cox, David Miller, Stephen Tweedie, Eric Troan), and enjoys a good reputation among the tens of millions of Linux users worldwide. VA Linux Systems has years of experience building Linux systems, a sterling reputation for service, and a top-flight team of developers (Ted Ts'o, San Mehat, Carsten `Rasterman' Haitzler).

LinuxOne has a copy of RedHat, a thin web site, and an S-1 filing for their IPO. That's it.

Credibility

No experience in Linux, just a RedHat CD with the name changed. No experience in successful IPOs, just a great hope that this time the bandwagon will carry them to riches. After all, the founder of LinuxOne has tried to IPO before on various fly-by-night schemes.

This is not a company hoping to profit from producing yet another distribution (there are 108 recorded Linux distributions at Linux Weekly News). This is not some quiet achiever who has decided to cash in on their hard work in an area related to Linux.

This two people trying to drain $24 million dollars from ignorant investors before the ceiling falls in on their valueless company, and they spend half the money in lawsuits brought on by the mom'n'pop investors (who know nothing of Linux, but saw the LINX ticker).

And no, they don't use their own distribution. It's a RedHat 6.0 web server.

Banking On Ignorance

LinuxOne is never going to make money. They have no plan to ever make money; hell, they don't have a plan to get any income. Why would anyone buy a distribution from a company reviled by the community , unknown to the world at large, and who offer nothing of benefit?

Their `new product' Linux on a disk? It's been done before, but Linux installations are becoming easy, and preinstalled systems widely available: anyone who's had to plug a second disk into their PC knows that it's not simply a matter of connecting up the wires.

They can keep producing pseudo-products for as long as they want (and use them to flesh out their web page), because no one is buying. They can invent the products on demand if someone were to order them; it's not like their reputation can get any worse.

Stock Prediction

It's going to drop through the floor. It'll probably stop short of miniscule, and fluctate as people get conned by the `LINX' ticker, then realize what has happened.

Then expect a lawsuit for software licence violations; I'd expect them to vanish without a trace in less than a month. If you want to see what part of history is going to be repeated, see the last time someone tried to screw the community .

LinuxTwo, anyone?

Paul `Rusty' Russell
rusty@rustcorp.com.au

Rusty is the Linux kernel IP firewall maintainer, and makes a good living producing software that everyone around the world can use. He wouldn't like to see the good reputation of the Linux operating system and related programs sullied by greed and ignorance. He does not own any LinuxOne stock.