E-Scribe News : a programmer’s blog

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PBX My name is Paul Bissex, and e-scribe.com is my consulting business. I build web applications using as much open source software as possible. From September to June I teach web design and other important non-photographic professional skills to photographers. In the '90s I wrote technology commentary and reviews for magazines, newspapers, and web publications, including Wired, Salon.com, FamilyPC, the late lamented Web Review, and the Chicago Tribune. Feel free to email me.

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I'm co-authoring a book, "Python Web Development with Django", with Jeff Forcier and Wesley Chun. It will be published by Prentice Hall in July 2008, but is available for pre-ordering on Amazon now.

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by Paul Bissex
and E-Scribe New Media

Why Tucows bought Kiko

Kiko, a Web 2.0-ish calendar company, recently sold itself on eBay. The buyer was Tucows, a company that you may know from their venerable and giant software download archives. Their CEO, Elliot Noss, says in his blog:

[There is] one big reason why we bought Kiko. We needed the functionality, quite desperately, inside of our email platform and it was going to take us a long time to get it. Especially at the level of sophistication Kiko has.

Tucows isn't about to release Kiko as open source; but according to their official line at least, they didn't buy the company to sell its product; they bought it to use its product.

This reminded me of something I heard from a Sun employee on a LUGRadio podcast -- that Sun originally bought StarOffice for much the same reason. To my surprise, the quote I remembered has made its way into the Wikipedia article on the subject:

The number one reason why Sun bought StarDivision in 1999 was because, at the time, Sun had something approaching forty-two thousand employees. Pretty much everyone of them had to have both a Unix workstation and a Windows laptop. And it was cheaper to go buy a company that could make a Solaris and Linux desktop productivity suite than it was to buy forty-two thousand licenses from Microsoft.

Wednesday, September 6th, 2006
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4 comments

Some related posts: Latest iPhone SDK bug reports • Stallman Inside • Open source bounties • Microsoft steps up FUD campaign against Linux • Eudora goes open source • Neelie Kroes vs. Microsoft
• Comment from Matthew Revell, later that day

Wow, that's really cool, that Simon's quote in our interview with him, has made it into the Wikipedia entry.

• Comment from Gamelexi, 1 week later

hrm really interesting. Anybody know what the price was they paid? I couldnt find the price. :( but I heard they got a fair price.

• Comment from Paul, 1 week later

Reports I saw put the price at a little over $250,000.

• Comment from Gamelexi, 1 week later

Wow thats not too bad. Thanks for the info.

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