Back when open source truly was overhyped
Remember 1999? Back then investors were throwing money at anything that moved and, in the case of Linuxcare, they were also throwing money at things that could barely manage a crawl. Open-source vendors VA Linux and Red Hat enjoyed massive IPOs...IPOs that quickly fell back to earth.
Linuxcare never made it that far, opting to pull its IPO, replace its CEO, and fire much of its staff.
Before we got to that point, however, someone came up with this lovely Linuxcare pre-IPO poster to celebrate, however. I had a hard time getting a good picture of it (and it was too big to scan in), but it does a great job of describing the tenor of the time, showing who the movers and shakers (and shaken) of the time were:
Linuxcare Pre-IPO Bash...In Pictures
How many of the industry's participants do you recognize?
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
