Why do you object to the current Linux Gold Rush? After all it helps to produce more open source software...

"I'm very idealistic.
I want to make the world a better place
 for me to live in."

From old Peanuts cartoon

I do not actually object. But the sad truth is that a lot of rank-and file developers might lose money as the shares price go down below the level they bought them.  The Linux companies stock valuations fluctuations just remind me that the US technology stock market can be considered as a new type of casino.  And playing Linux card is a very dangerous play. I'll be the first to admit that proprietary companies (with Microsoft and Oracle as the leaders) have abused their end of the spectrum. But Linux companies instead of solving that problem actually created a second problem.  It's rather difficult to actually generate a substantial revenue off of open source software in this new commercial space to justify valuation at which they were sold at IPO. Moreover if you overshoot and hire people faster than you can increase revenue, you can't  survive in a long run.  Recently Corel announced plans to lay off 20% of its workforce. Linuxcare has postponed its IPO and is looking for additional financing to stay afloat. TurboLinux, once a bright star in the Linux heavens, has declared bankruptcy.

With a multimillion losses each quarter (for example RHAT net loss for the first quarter of fiscal 2001 is $14.9 million) IPO capital will not last forever and probably only Red Hat and Caldera have enough money to survive for at least a decade of losses on that scale (Caldera got much less money via IPO than RH, but in addition to IPO money Caldera  has several hundred million of Microsoft money due to the successful DrDos lawsuit). In his Linux Journal column Open Source is Dead: I Read it on the Net Jason Compton wrote:

...Dreamers who think open source will lead directly to a global gift economy by 2003 or some nonsense like that aside, the challenge for "commercial" open source has been and will continue to be finding a sustainable support and services revenue stream to make the books balance at the end of the year. If you take a little peek over at LinuxCare and their recent financial and management troubles, you will see that this sort of business plan takes careful planning, execution, and luck."

...Because the truth is that open source doesn't cure cancer, doesn't lead to a global gift economy, and doesn't produce perfect software on the first, second, or even fifty-seventh try. Hell, I could put together a laundry list right now of glaring flaws and shortcomings in Linux that I blame squarely on open source development and developers. But that's another column.

I tried to warn that like in case of science, any serious OSS development involves certain risks and requires not only talent but a certain courage to be away from the marketplace in order not to permit marketplace to enslave you. Commercialization of open source is a mixed blessing and it does attract to the movement wrong people. With gold rush the type of people that movement require for survival (devoted academic researchers. aspiring students in computer science departments  and voluntary programmers from the industry all over the globe, who slowly and persistently implement their new vision,  or polish important for community programs, or provide an alternative to an existing but expensive tool)  find themselves on the sidelines.  They cannot compete with fulltimers in OSS startups and feel pressure either to move into them or adopt a second roles or quit. 

There is another important danger that commercial development of represent -- the danger of  featurism. Now that many of the Linux distributions have gone public, their first job is to make money for their stockholders and they have money to make open source products as complex or even more complex that other competing commercial products. The simplest way to differentiate themselves is to have software that can featurewise compete with the best closed source products including Microsoft products (in a really Zen way turning in a process into open source bloatware). The next logical step is to develop products that take advantage of a particular distribution (and there are already several packages developed specifically for Red Hat, that are supported only on Red Hat although they might run on other distributions too). If every distribution can run it, how can they keep/attract users and generate the profit?

In the same way the independence of Linux press, especially commercialized part of it, is questionable. In order to survive they need to get advertisement dollars whatever it cost and that means that they are essentially a highly biased "party press":

What bother me is the fact that this self-censorship dramatically increases with consolidation of Linux companies that produced  strange bedfellows like Slashdot and VA Linux. As another Slashdot reader put it  #156:

All of us would be well-served by keeping at least a healthy suspicion of VA. The sad part about the whole Linux movement is, that when you get down to it, VA and companies like them don't care about you. They don't have to care. They're going to do everything within their power to screw their way into the black and keep the board of directors happy, just like any other publicly held business.

After VA Linux acquisition the editorial independence of Slashdot is highly suspect. Why would a company such as VA spend $900 million for a company that lost $3 million last year? Call me a pessimist, but as far as I've seen, the one of the reasons why a company can spend such a huge amount of money is when it expects to profit from the implicit advertising and strong marketing of VA brand provided by Slashdot. Actually this is very consistent with VA prev. acquisition of the Linux.com domain in 1999. In this case VA has tried to leverage close relationship with the Linux community as the key point of differentiation from similar hardware vendors and that strategy played handsomely during IPO.  Without strong marketing of VA brand as the "leading open source company" VA Linux could find itself in trouble when much larger players, like Compaq (with 25% share of total Linux servers shipments) and IBM (with 10% share) preinstall Linux on their servers and have much better research and are more diversified that VA. As one Slashdot correspondent described this model:

Selling this open source model by appealing to logic appears to be on shaky ground. How about a slick marketing campaign instead, with lots of slo-mo, leather, and hypnotic music.

As the Standard noted in its commentary about the deal:

Whatever the exact price, few bothered with the deal's substance. The Reuters story didn't even mention Slashdot until the last paragraph, and the NYT/TSC article didn't mention the news site at all. Perhaps concentrated media ownership has simply become too common to remark upon, but Salon.com's Andrew Leonard and Wired News' Joanna Glasner noted that Slashdot is now owned by one of the companies it frequently covers. "[A] linkup between a major systems distributor and a content hub looks like a dangerous combination" to some in the open source community, wrote Glasner, although VA Linux said it wouldn't try to control content on Andover sites.

Salon's Leonard recalled a conversation in which Slashdot founder Rob Malda explained why he didn't want to be acquired by VA Linux. "One of his main concerns in choosing who Slashdot would be acquired by was that it not be a Linux company," wrote Leonard. "The potential for compromising Slashdot's editorial integrity would be too great." Leonard concluded that no matter how scrupulously Slashdot maintains its editorial independence, the appearance of compromise is inevitable, and that "the world of free software is all the poorer for it." As is the world of tech journalism.

Actually there is a pressure for Linux software vendors to become  hardware vendors. In the Linux market, where it's axiomatic that software can be downloaded for free, small vendors are finding that they must package software as a hardware appliance to have a viable commercial product. For example, that's the strategy at Workfire.com, whose Web-accelerating cache algorithms are packaged in hardware, with Linux as an embedded operating system. That means that Linux-related products might concentrate in a appliance and server niches where profits from hardware might compensate for the cost of development of open source. Some predict that the number of players in Linux software area will decrease significantly in a couple of years from now. That means that job security of those who are employed by Linux software companies are not that assured.

The second part of the problem is that Make Money Fast Open Source IPOs brought to the movement quite another type of people -- people that can distort the reality without any problem if that serves their needs. In some other aspects situation starts looking like commercially oriented sect that can distort information for the sake of enlarging the movement; this tendency actually increased with the commercialization of Linux media like Slashdot.org. The Me use Linux too IPO open sore Linus open ebiz ASP solutions satire aptly described crazy atmosphere of the second half of 1999 -- the time of Red Hat and VA Linux IPOs: 

The final destruction of what used to be a charming little OS scene arrived today, Monday, December 13, 1999.

Linuxtoday is spewing forth "me-use-linux-too-IPO-open-sore-Linus-open-ebiz-ASP-solutions" press releases from every backwater, buzzless Joe Q. Corp with a hotmail account...

OS figureheads are being courted for interviews with a veracity that is usually reserved only for pathological child molesters and internet CEOs...

Forty thousand "Embedded Internet eSolution Firewall Privacy Biz Remote" solutions are being deeply discounted to the five people who care enough to add one more yeahd00ditssecure.pl script to their boxes...

2-bit players are buying half-bit companies without a dime to their names just to get at the word Linux in their press releases...