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Linux Business

Has TurboLinux Collapsed? 191

Posted by timothy from the and-all-for-one dept.
An anonymous reader writes: "UnitedLinux already is short one founding member. Linuxgram reports that TurboLinux has collapsed." The sources mentioned are all anonymous so far; the TurboLinux website is functioning, and offers no indications that the company isn't also.
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Has TurboLinux Collapsed? More

Has TurboLinux Collapsed?

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  • A friend of mine worked for Turbolabs (Score:4, Informative)

    by Twister002 ( 537605 ) on Thursday July 18, 2002 @06:22PM (#3912425) Homepage
    and he is no longer working there, they've closed the Santa Fe Turbolabs office.

    It looks like Turbolabs is closing all their US offices and trying to sell off their products before they close their Asian offices.

    • Re:A friend of mine worked for Turbolabs (Score:4, Informative)

      by Twister002 ( 537605 ) on Thursday July 18, 2002 @06:41PM (#3912594) Homepage
      PS he was told Monday that they were closing, I had lunch with him on Wednesday.
    • correction, It looks like TurboLINUX is closing all their US offices. TurboLabs (based in Santa Fe) was a research division. My friend who worked there told me the same info as the article linked to above yesterday at lunch.


    • If all the Turbo Linux codes are GPLed, (I'm assuming, so don't sue me, please !) then is it possible for another entity to pick up the entire T-Linux codes and move on ?

    • Well I worked there from May of 2000 thru May 2001. I was @ Interop in Vegas, We all (25+) tayed at THE MIRAGE, my first dinner out that night, we went across the street to this chineese place, drank and ate alot of food. After the dinner, we all put a $1 on the table, and took a bet on the bill, the bets were from $495 UP TO $800... we got the bill, it was over $1200! They paid for it by breaking it up over 2 credit cards... (So accounting would not find out about it...)... 2 weeks later, we all went to ISPCON in DISNEY... Later that year we did a road show with IBM... Boy, those were the days, we all lived good... stayed at the best hotels (sometimes, like in NYC, at $350 a night!).... ate the best foods... But as they say, all good things must come to an end! I made it thru 3 layoffs in the year I was there... I left after the 3rd one occured! I remember walking into the 1/4'ly meetings and saying... We need this, this, this and this... and every 1/4 nothing would change, expect for the VP of SALES... went thru 4 of them... I am sad to see it go... but I am not surprised! I loved working for TL and sometimes wish I could have gone back... But... then again, that was after a few drinks... The company really went downhill after CLIFF AND IRIS were fired... they were the heart an sole of the comapny (have since went on to run a succesful company www.mountainviewdata.com)... In closing.. I wish all my friends who are still there and who had worked there before.. the best of luck! P.S. always remember... Eating on the boat at PIER 39, under water... now that was cool!
      • Is their new company doing well? I heard they fired the chief architect, Pete Braam, the developer of Coda distributed filesystem. And a friend of mine who criticized them for doing the same mistakes they did with Turbolinux was dismissed too. At least, they don't have any major partners or customers yet in Asia. For me, they are also resposible for the demise of Turbolinux.

        This is not a failure of Linux or Turbolinux OS itself, but a personal failure for the people involved with the company.
  • it was fine until we slashdotted the webserver ;-)

  • Talk about being responsible (Score:3, Insightful)

    by The_Ronin ( 202785 ) on Thursday July 18, 2002 @06:23PM (#3912429)
    Nice to see Slashdot verifying rumors before posting. If they were not hurting before, causing a panic will sure hurt them now.

    This isn't "News for Geeks," this is blatant irresponsible journalism.

    Nice job guys.

    • Re:Talk about being responsible (Score:5, Insightful)

      by bje2 ( 533276 ) on Thursday July 18, 2002 @06:44PM (#3912612)
      i don't see this as irresponsible journalism on slashdot's part...slashdot just provides its users with whatever news the editors feel is relevant to reprint...if you want to blame anyone for being irresponsible, then blame the folks over at Linux Gram, who actually reported the story...and from what i read in the story, they seem to have multiple (albeit anonymous) sources...so, i'm fine with slashdot posting this...
    • This is where you are supposed to READ THE FAQ [slashdot.org]
    • Next, people on slashdot will be saying *BSD is dying!

      err, oh wait...
    • How exactly would this hurt them? Companies are not harmed by their stock selling off providing their underlying finances are in good shape, all that a low stock price does is deprive a company of pursuing equity financing. In the case of TL they weren't even public so it would have less impact.

      This idea that the media should be careful with bad news about companies but blasé about publishing good news is why Enron et al got away with their nonsense.
    • I didn't see slashdot verfing anything in this post. Besides, if this story/rumor is posted on /. maybe a reader will have more insight as to what's going on and get modded up. That's what's so cool about slashdot.

      The other thing is when things go bad in Linux land people unite and support. I would like to see your explanation as to why this story will hurt them more as opposed to helping them (if they are indeed in trouble).

  • Slashdot: Rumor mill (Score:3, Insightful)

    by dextr0us ( 565556 ) <dextr0us@spl . a t> on Thursday July 18, 2002 @06:24PM (#3912446) Homepage Journal
    That is a rumor. Untill i hear otherwise from a more notable source, i wouldn't believe it. I dont have a link, but i remember a few years back someone mentioning that redhat would die before releasing redhat 5, in favor of caldera. That was from a semi-reputible site like that link.

  • Dearth of information (Score:5, Informative)

    by MAXOMENOS ( 9802 ) <mike&mikesmithfororegon,com> on Thursday July 18, 2002 @06:24PM (#3912447) Homepage
    Let's see.

    • Nothing on F***edCompany
    • Nothing on LinuxToday
    • Nothing but rumors on NewsForge
    • Nothing on the TurboLinux website

    Sounds to me like a non-story, or at worst, an indication that their US operation might contract and the company focus might shift to Japan.

    • Rumor has it Microsoft will buy Yahoo (Score:5, Interesting)

      by cpeterso ( 19082 ) on Thursday July 18, 2002 @07:03PM (#3912759) Homepage

      Of course, Fucked Company does have a "story" about Microsoft's plans to buy Yahoo [fuckedcompany.com]. Why isn't that also on the Slashdot front page?

  • Damn.... (Score:1, Troll)

    by reaper20 ( 23396 )
    UnitedLinux already is short one founding member.

    Too bad it isn't the one we were hoping for [caldera.com].

    • Re:Damn.... (Score:3, Informative)

      by XBL ( 305578 )
      Wow, what a fucking troll. Caldera is the most-bashed company/distro, and for very little reason. They have contributed much back to the open-source community, and have tried to follow-through on legit businesses practices that they hope will keep their company afloat.

      Their distribution is one of the most stable and coherent of them all. I was sad to see them wanting to do this UnitedLinux crap. They are just trying to survive.

      Idiot.

  • A sad day for Linux (Score:1, Interesting)

    by slashclone ( 571895 )

    I'm sure M$ will be quick to add TBLs collapese to their revamped Linux FUD page. Linux vendors not being there in the long term to provide support and all that.
  • I think the fragmentation of the linux market is a good thing. Anything that stops a single vendor from having a monolopy is a good thing. So i feel united linux was a good thing. Although I personally feel debian will stand the test of time, resisting red hat for supremacy.
    • Trying to stay slightly on-topic I would like to say that debian never will gain a large, mainstream position, debian based distros on the other hand will. They are usually compiled by smaller teams and is getting updated faster. Debian however is too slow.

      Now that TurboLinux might be going down, (I'll take this rumour with a jar of salt) the marked won't be notably hurt. There is an abdundance of distros ready to capture TL's market share. Despite what people seem to think there is little difference between distros. User rarly notice the difference between the distros. I my self could not tell a RedHat system from a decent Debian based distro if I didn't see the boot up (and both carried both apt and rpm.)
    • Although I personally feel debian will stand the test of time, resisting red hat for supremacy.

      Do you mean commercially? Did you pay for Debian? I didn't. I didn't pay for RedHat, either, but I hear they are selling a few copies here and there. The slashdot-referenced article earlier today about HP and Debian kept mentioning Debian for internal use.

      Or do you mean stand the test of time as the geek's uber-distro?

      Just Curious
    • Now if only their stable releases would move forward some...what version of the 2.4.x kernel is the latest?
    • I think the fragmentation of the linux market is a good thing. Anything that stops a single vendor from having a monolopy is a good thing. So i feel united linux was a good thing. Although I personally feel debian will stand the test of time, resisting red hat for supremacy. Yes, but I think the Linux market is a little too fragmented at this point - nobody is earning enough to make a profit! This was inevitable really, and I don't think Turbo will be the last. If anyone is going to make money in this space, one of two things have to occur: either there needs to be a bigger market, or there needs to be less suppliers. I don't really see Debian and RedHat as competitors. Debian is not a for-profit company, they're more art for art's sake, like GNU. A company that's interested in buying their product from a company that provides services and consulting on top ala RedHat isn't even going to consider Debian. They both appeal to a different audience.

  • TurboLinux business plan (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    1. Collapse the company
    2. Maintain website
    3. Profit

  • This is for real (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 18, 2002 @06:33PM (#3912543)
    I know somebody who is employed there, and according to them, TurboLinux is going out of biz. They're all waiting for their last paychecks, and apparently employees even had problems with their health insurance not being paid for for the last few weeks.
    • An A/C posts a rumor, and it's modded up to 3?
    • Actually my brother works at Turbo Labs too. He worked on High Availability project for Linux...which he said never really raked in profits for TL(didn't have the 5 nines nor sold hardware with it).

      Also many of the projects are being cancelled due to some murky waters at the corporation. My brother recieved his last paycheck--but only half of it. He's still waiting for the other half to come through.

      • Re:This is for real (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Marsala ( 4168 ) on Friday July 19, 2002 @01:26AM (#3914763) Homepage
        HAH.

        Kashif, I'm sincerely sorry to hear about your brother, but he's not the first person at TL who's gotten the shaft for what is basically leadership ineptitude. Hopefully, he'll be one of the last, though.

        What strikes me as ironic, though, is that I had a conversation about this back in November of 1999 (and I left the company the next day for this and some other reasons) with the (then) CEO where I warned him about this. My immediate supe warned both him and the board this was going to happen and had his foresight rewarded by being marginalized in the company's decision making structure until he finally got sick of it and left a few months after I did. If I see an article anywhere claiming that the company was blind sided by this or that they blame it all on "market conditions", I won't know whether to laugh or cry.

        In the popular street vernacular (at least for 1992 :-), let's kick the ballistics. And keep in mind that the costs of development and number of units shipped are just theoretical here and used only to illustrate a point. I didn't have any access to any hard numbers since TL was most definitely not an "openbook" shop and absolutely loved to keep secrets.

        Any rate.

        You are a small start up company, and you have three (arguably two) products. The first one is a Linux distribution you sell as a the "desktop" version for $50 a shot. To date, in the US, you can claim about 100,000 sales of this particular product. If you focused on this product and this product only, you'd spend about $400,000 to produce it (salaries+benefits, cost of printing the cds, advertising).

        Your second product, you bill as a "server". You charge $700 for this product, which is the same as your desktop product except you strip out stuff like XF86, GNOME, kde, pcmcia support, and other things that don't make sense to have on a server. You set up contracts to bundle third party software (like say a commercial mail system, database, or whatever) as a bundle. Since you're not actually developing a whole lot of new stuff here, you can piggy back most of the costs (salaries+benefits) on to the cost of the first product... so the actual cost to produce is around $200K. And today, you've sold a couple hundred units, so an expectation of shipping 1000 units isn't too far beyond the scope of believability (we're keeping numbers round here to make the math easier).

        Since there's a lot of overlap, both of those products can arguably be considered the same thing (but from a sales/revenue standpoint, they're distinct).

        And now you have the last product. A load balancing product (clustering is beowulf, folks) that can nominally do the same thing as some of the hardware offerings from companies like Cisco.
        Let's be generous and say that you will need another $200K to develop this product (probably an underestimation) by itself. It's not taking into account that you'll still need the distro to be the vehicle for delivering the product, or a full swing ad campaign. Let's say you've had that on the market for 2 months, and you've only sold 5 copies at about $2K a pop.

        So, here are the numbers (sorry about the periods, but there doesn't seem to be any good way to set up a table in a comment with slashcode):

        Prod___Units Sold__Price___TtlCost__ Ttl Profit
        desktop.....100,000........50......(400,00 0)....4, 600,000
        server.............1000......700......(20 0,000)... ..500,000
        cluster.................5.....2000..... .(200,000). ...(190,000)

        Now, suddenly, the dot-com era begins. VCs are throwing money at you like a Div I schools throws hookers at an all-star quarterback. You get a nice chunk of money, and you have to decide where you invest it. Do you:

        a) invest more in the desktop/server product by
        hiring more developers and try to increase
        those sales number by improving your product
        and going head to head with other commercial
        distros who are doing the same thing?

        OR....

        b) invest money into building up a sales and
        marketing brigade dedicated solely to the
        cluster product in the hopes that you some day
        will be able to ship 100,000 units of that at
        $2K?

        If you chose "a", then you're not qualified to be a TL executive. The answer is "b". And not only do we choose "b", but we start giving away our desktop product for free by reducing the price to $40, giving retail stores a $20 rebate on top of the $10 discount we already give them, and then a $10 rebate inside the box for the customer. That way, we can eliminate that troublesome "revenue" crap and turn our only source of real income into a cost center (because it's about $5 to actually make a boxed product).

        And, oh yeah... let's piss off the community by trying to close source everything we can lay a claim to that isn't GPL'd (like our cluster product), release a marketing announcement for the most pedestrian of accomplishments, and generally try avoid supporting our customers with stuff like security updates.

        I brought up these concerns and said, "I think it's a mistake to focus so many resources on cluster and ignore the base distro". I was told, "I don't see us being a billion dollar company without doing it."

        Have you ever been in a conversation with someone and then just suddenly realized that the person you were talking was going to end up drinking the poisoned Kool-Aid and nothing you said or did would ever keep that from happening? It's a fscking eery feeling, let me tell ya.

        Any rate.

        To John: don't think about it, or you'll just get frustrated. To Cliff: Toldyaso. To Lonn: please stop before this happens again. And to Rok: thanks for dropping my name from the CREDITS file even though 30% of TL 7 uses RPMs with my name in the changelog, dork.

        To everyone else involved in the debacle, best of luck to you and I hope things work out for you.
        • Hmm. Let's see. TurboLinux had three products, as you've said.

          Two of those were direct competitors with RedHat, an already established company. At least one of these also competed with debian, a well-established distribution.

          The third, a product nobody else was making, cost significantly more to the end user and thus had a significantly higher profit margin.

          In what universe would it seem like a good idea *not* to focus on the product where you're NOT competing with two large, popular distributions?

          No, I'm not saying "Throw away the revenue generators" like you say the TL people did. But competing directly with RedHat and ignoring the opportunity to be a market leader in a space, well. That simply isn't good business, Kool-Aid or not.
          • I disagree.

            While RedHat and Debian and Caldera and Mandrake were indeed competitors, they weren't our major ones. These weren't the people we had to beat. It was Microsoft, Novell, and Sun (on the low-end). So it was worse than just taking on RedHat.

            Also at that time (1999), Linux was starting to be taken seriously by the IT world and you were starting to get a lot of folks from those companies looking in the general direction of Linux. None of the commercial distros had the resources to pick up all of the experimenters and there was more than enough to go around and this is why we got the whole "Big Four" thing (RH, Caldera, TL, and SuSE).

            The problem is, though, that you had to get your numbers up and keep them up, or else people like Oracle, IBM, and SGI didn't want to talk to you. Yeah, it was hard in the beginning since RH had the advantage of being a first mover and therefore a larger market, but they weren't invulnerable at that time. But the weak spot was something that could be quickly reinforced if you didn't move fast enough.

            So market share, even if it isn't enough to make you number one in the market, is important. You get the revenue benefits (as pointed out in my first post) plus you get the clout with other vendors you need to have on your side.

            The second thing is cluster. Even though no one else in *LINUX* space was offering a loadbalanced kit, it wasn't the only load balancer solution out there. And hardware load balancers end up doing a better job and being more reliable than the software based ones... that's just a fact. And if you've got enough money and the need to make sure that your website is up 24/7, you aren't going to cheap out and spend $2K on a software solution that doesn't meet all your needs when for $5K you can get a switch that does.

            The one smart thing TL did to salvage the "cluster" situation was to actually produce a real clustering (beowulf, not load balancing) solution with EnFuzion later on. I still don't think it made a lot of money, but I would guess that it did better than TLCluster did.

            IMO, the "opportunity" in the load balancing world was a mirage, and I don't really know of any other way to make a buck in any business other than competing head to head with a market leader (save being the first mover in that market).... if you've got some ideas though, I'm all ears. :-)
  • I wonder if a slashdotting will take it down?

    -1 obvious joke.

    Or how about: the extra bandwidth charges definitely wil put them under.

  • Self-fulfilling prophecy? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by quantaman ( 517394 ) on Thursday July 18, 2002 @06:41PM (#3912593)
    From the sounds of the article TurboLinux wasn't doing so well to begin with. Even if this story turns out to be false it might still cause TurboLinux's stock to nosedive completely killing them off for real :(
    • Doubtful. The stock might take a hit, but that in and of itself won't kill TurboLinux.

      Of course, this assumes that TurboLinux really isn't closing its doors.

    • Is TurboLinux public?! (Score:3, Informative)

      by Eric Green ( 627 )
      As far as I know, TurboLinux *HAS* no stock. Their "stock" tanking isn't going to put them out of business. Running out of cash to pay their creditors, on the other hand... well...
      • That's correct, they were never a public company and cash reservs that they had when I joyned them at end the end of 2000 was $30ml. In less than a year that became just $5 after the failed merger with Linuxcare (they had to pay the laweyrs' fees in several millions for that failed attempt). Since venture capital dried up in this kind of bear market they have no way of keeping the business going. That will impact to some extent companies such as IBM, because Turbo had several server products for their eServer. IBM helped SuSE In a similar situation, but IBM is having its own difficulties.

  • huh? (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Whats is TurboLinux.... never heard of it.

  • TurboLinux Web Site (Score:5, Funny)

    by e_n_d_o ( 150968 ) on Thursday July 18, 2002 @06:47PM (#3912631)
    the TurboLinux website is functioning

    This is a link to the TurboLinux Web site. [turbolinux.com]

    Everyone please go and check to make sure it is still functioning.

  • WTF (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bogie ( 31020 ) on Thursday July 18, 2002 @06:51PM (#3912671) Journal
    "Conventional wisdom has suggested for some time that none of the Linux distributions, perhaps not even Red Hat, will survive long-term and of course all of the successive business failures that have happened among the Linux set call into question the commercial viability of the open source model. "

    Umm, what the fuck is she smoking. So I guess Redhat et al should just pack it up?

    BTW if that's "conventional wisdom" what is Linuxgram going to do based on a business model that reports on these companies?
    • See, by stating the doom of all of these companies it naturally leads to them suggesting you should click on over to their site to watch the crash. They'll of course report on this in great detail and rake in the ad banner clicks.

      Sensationalist statements like that could be overzealous reporting, clever marketing, or both. News organizations learned long ago that people don't tune in to watch the everyday mundane. They want sensationalism, tragedy, and bigger than life stories. Just meeting market demand I guess.
      • "Sensationalist statements like that could be overzealous reporting, clever marketing, or both."

        Possibly, but I don't recall any sites who are devoted to Microsoft "business" predicting MS's timely demise as a certainty. It simply makes no sense to say "Conventional wisdom has suggested for some time that none of the Linux distributions.....will survive long-term"

        Their writer is a represetative for Linuxgram, who by their name alone is stating that their is and will be "linux business to write about".

        If I was the editor(who apparently did not proofread this), that writer would be fired.

    • Well, duh. "Conventional wisdom" is that a company needs to earn a profit in order to survive. So far, no companies making solely Linux distributions has come close to making a real profit. I know it's "kooky", this whole "profit" thing, but that's the way it is... How wacky.... A company needing to make a profit... What will they think of next?

  • You know a company went down hard when... (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    You know a company went down hard when they don't have anyone around to pull the plug on the webserver.
  • Yeah, i bet the Turbo Linux executives are thinking "Well, we're about to go down the drain why not get the webmaster to put a little note on the homepage even though we can't paid them!"
    When there's chaos, who's got time to tell anyone about it??

  • More To Come (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I was laid off from Xandros About a month ago.. No final paycheque and those who are left are working without pay..

  • I work in the building (Score:5, Interesting)

    by BigMacDaddy ( 578271 ) on Thursday July 18, 2002 @07:09PM (#3912802)
    And the rumor here has been that they are going under and moving out by the end of the month.
  • How did the awful term widgetry, as used in the Linuxgram article, come into wide use?

    Outside of GUIs the term widget refers to a meta-thing. But widgetry is used to refer to concrete things: "SuSe Enterprise Server widgetry", "server blade widgetry".

    What's wrong with "SuSe Enterprise Server software" and "server blade hardware"? Plus it doesn't reek of "ain't I clever" poserdom.

    </rant>
    • The whole article reads as if it were being announced by some bubble-headed bleach blond on the evening news. Such a happy, chirpy little article about the potential death of a company. We should all be sent to our graves with such an obit.

      </sarcasm>

      At least it's speld kerekkly.

      </end cheap shot at /.'ers who are able to re-wire an HD in the dark while being poked with a sharp stick repeatedly, and yet couldn't spell if you offered them a week with a harem of supermodels, excepting the parent post who apparently does know how to spell and this post in which it was intentional.>

  • What is this, fuckedcompany? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Tom7 ( 102298 ) on Thursday July 18, 2002 @08:05PM (#3913179) Homepage Journal
    If there's no confirmation, and the slashdot editors don't bother to try to confirm themselves, what the hell is the point of posting this? To "scoop" everyone (even though someone else is already carrying the rumor)? Let's save the rumor mongering for fuckedcompany, and (unless it's something really, really interesting) try to report more developed stories on the news sites.
    • I know. Now some *other* website will put up a link saying that *Slashdot* says that it's rumored that TurboLinux is dead, and it spreads from there. Slashdot is a major site, and stories on it have been known to jump to AP sites.
    • Come on...Drudge Report, Slashdot, FuckedCompany...unfounded and often incorrect rumors are simply the tail end of whats left of the fun part of the internet.

      Stop trying to hold back the tides. Let the BS and the truth come out at its own pace, and stop pretending there is any value in controlling it.

  • Yet another beleagured bombshell hit the slashdot community today when it was revealed that Turbolinux may be dying. Linuxgram sent this weeniegram [linuxgram.com] purporting the apparent demise.

    And it doesn't stop there! Linuxgram hits home with the realization that all the commercial distros are facing problems, and that's why they were banding together to form UnitedLinux. But a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Now it shows that TurboLinux may destroy the whole UnitedLinux project!

  • OSS problem (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This sad event neatly illustrates one of the problems with OSS--when a company gets in trouble there's very little incentive for someone like IBM to ride in on their white horse and rescue the company. All the key IP is OSS and freely available, and if some big company wants to hire some of the newly laid off people, they can, without having to pay a huge premium for insubstantial and unwanted things like the company name.

    • This sad event neatly illustrates one of the problems with OSS--when a company gets in trouble there's very little incentive for someone like IBM to ride in on their white horse and rescue the company.

      Eh? So?

      The company was not genetically viable. If it was, it wouldn't have its stakeholders saying, "Give us our money back before you crater so we can cut our losses." There are fundamental structural flaws here that make this company a prime candidate for darwination.

      In short, the company failed to earn the right to live.

      And while that might be a tragedy to you and anyone else looking at the situation from a business standpoint and hoping to someday profit from it, the fact of the matter is that the contributions that the company made to the free software world (like internationalization work TL did) aren't going away.

      To me, this sad event underscores one of the virtues of Open Source Software. Even though the profit-driven organization goes away, the code and contributions it made remains.

  • IBM was the winner on Sherwin Williams contract (Score:3, Insightful)

    by AELinuxGuy ( 588522 ) on Thursday July 18, 2002 @09:26PM (#3913670)
    So TuboLinux is picked as the Linux distro for 9,700 cash registers at Sherwin Williams [slashdot.org], but who is the big winner...IBM because they win the servicing contract. Like it or not, the future of commercial Linux is in either services (consulting, certification, customization, etc.) or per-seat-license type distros. Fortunately there exists non-commercial Linux distros that do not need to show a profit to stick around. No need to impress the VC; no need to mislead the press to preserve market valuation. If lots of people are using the distro then that is good...if not then that is fine too because the maintainers are still using it. It brings images to mind of the Black Knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail who gets his arms and legs chopped off and still believes he is invincible.

    • Heh, I bet the head IT decision-maker at Sherwin Williams is shitting his pants right about now. Dude probably has a nice pink slip sitting on his desk waiting for him tomorrow morning.

      • Heh, I bet the head IT decision-maker at Sherwin Williams is shitting his pants right about now. Dude probably has a nice pink slip sitting on his desk waiting for him tomorrow morning.

        Why? They have support from IBM. And when the time comes for an upgrade, they just switch distros. Which will be very easy indeed if they're using the United Linux varient. No biggie. We're talking Linux here, after all.
    • As another poster replying to this post stated so nicely, the people being responsible for IT at Sherwin Williams will be pissing their pants. Even if both they and the project survive this, they will put a big shiny plate over their bed "Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft". And Microsoft has a great case for demonstrating their point that all open source companies are on the verge of collapse and one is insane for choosing Linux for a large project over the nice reliable offerings from a laaaaarge and seemingly undestructible company.

      Noone will mind that there perhaps still is support from IBM. And if they really want to switch distros on all their new systems, well...

      • As another poster replying to this post stated so nicely, the people being responsible for IT at Sherwin Williams will be pissing their pants.
        Why? Unless they were blindingly stupid, they have a contract that allows them to clone the software to their heart's content (possibly paying a modest royalty to TL or TL's creditors), and that gives them access (perhaps via IBM) to the source code, which means they can keep deploying and repairing cash registers without missing a beat.
        Even if both they and the project survive this, they will put a big shiny plate over their bed "Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft".
        When you're through with that crack pipe, pass it over here. ;-)

        Win2K Pro costs around $75, and requires on the order of $50 in extra hardware (big hard drive, extra RAM, faster CPU) to run well. For 9700 cash registers, Windows increases the cost by $1.2M. (I'm ignoring the substantial cost of client access licenses for Microsoft servers.)

        $1.2M can pay for a lot of glitches. It can buy 7000 man-hours of top engineering support (at $100/hour), and still be a net savings.

        And this analysis ignores the effects of reliability (cash registers crashing == customer alienation and lost sales), and long-term supportability (trying getting Win2K support in 2008).

        • Why? Unless they were blindingly stupid, they have a contract that allows them to clone the software to their heart's content (possibly paying a modest royalty to TL or TL's creditors), and that gives them access (perhaps via IBM) to the source code, which means they can keep deploying and repairing cash registers without missing a beat.

          I didn't say that they are really fucked, but that they might be thinking this for the moment. As we all know, even if they have to right to clone the software for everybody on the planet, business software without support is worth nil. Yes, I know, it's open source, but I don't know if this gives them a warm fuzzy feeling when their big bad boss reads his Wall Street Journal in the morning and thinks "Turbo Linux gone broke.... that name.... rings a bell...... ARGH !" Again: It's not important what the real situation is like, but what they and (most importantly) their bosses think (the great paradoxon of business life. Reality is nothing, Arthur Anderson says we are doing fine, so what's that crap about bancruptcy. Works also the other way round).

          When you're through with that crack pipe, pass it over here. ;-)
          /me passes the pipe :-)

          Win2K Pro costs around $75, and requires on the order of $50 in extra hardware (big hard drive, extra RAM, faster CPU) to run well. For 9700 cash registers, Windows increases the cost by $1.2M. (I'm ignoring the substantial cost of client access licenses for Microsoft servers.)

          I don't want to argue about the additional costs (ok, perhaps they could use some XP embedded or CE or whatever MS offers for embedded stuff), it will cost substantially more. At least by our usual standards. OTOH, $1.2M is not that much for a large company, and if they THINK they get a better value for their money (I don't say that they really get it) they might go with MS again next time. As said before: It's all about psychology, and this is darn bad psychology for Linux. Buying costs doesn't matter that much in big business. Even in the bad old IBM big iron times there were considerably cheaper (and functionally adequate) alternatives, but people went with what they thought kept their butts covered against their bosses.

  • Hmm, let's see:

    1. The economy is tanking, thanks to some large corporations' fearless leaders and the fact that our national fearless leader is just another one of the corporate fearless leaders who are causing the economy to tank (Oh, the logic, the logic!);

    2. TurboLinux tries to make a living selling something which not only do they not own, but is readily available for free from innumerable sources;

    3. They have a bunch of highly overpaid PHBs who don't contribute much at all to generating income for the company (How do I know this? All companies have too many PHBs who don't contribute much at all to generating income for the company. Just look at your own company and figure the ratio of income generators vs. non-income generators and then factor in salaries;)

    4. Their otherwise free product for which they charge dollars is sub-standard when compared with the other _commercial_ Linuxes with which they compete.

    Hmmm, just doesn't add up to a working proposition. You do the math; does it work for you? I don't mean to be mean or to be an asshole or to troll, but sheesh, if the writing on wall were any bigger they'd have to borrow more wall.

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday July 18, 2002 @10:34PM (#3914052)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Has anyone checked out their home site.
    <a href="http://www.g2news.com>www.g2news.com</a&g t;
  • Last I checked most high-tech businesses were hurting pretty bad. It seems fairly intuitive to me that the current economy will probably cause the weaker for-profit Linux offerings to die off.

    If somebody made a list of all the Windows based hi-tech offerings that went bust last year... anyways, nobody would read it because it'd be too long and boring.

    Personally, I see Suse and Redhat at the end of this tunnel-- hopefully Mandrake and Connectiva also-- as there'll always be the none-commercial/niche offerings. Also, it doesn't hurt to point out that the free distros existed and thrived well before the commercial ones, just as they do now.

    Silly rabbits.

  • In other news... (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    The sources mentioned are all anonymous so far

    In other news, we've been receiving a large number of annonymous posts that author Stephen King was killed outside his home in Maine.

  • News on TurboLinux site (Score:2, Interesting)

    by mencik ( 516959 )
    If one goes to the TurboLinux [turbolinux.com] website and clicks through to news and events, there is a new entry [turbolinux.com] there for today, 7/19/02. In that entry it talks about a new agreement to provide Linux for IBM mainframes. If they were going under immediately, why would they enter into this agreement?
    • That mainframe thing was released on June 19, so it is the old news. Their tech support for mainframe is non-existent internally, becaue they (the engineering head) gave it away in a sweet deal to Sytek, the third part vendor. Their upper management is no better than in some of those companies who we hear about in the news. It's all managemens decissions, or mmost of it.
  • I remember scanning japanese netblocks for insecure linux boxes with , and once and a while I'd come across a abandoned turbolinux box.
    Japs liked turbolinux because it came with a jap manual but nobody else around the world was dumb enough to (buy|download) it.

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