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TurboLinux Businesses

Turbolinux Sells Linux Business 221

Posted by CmdrTaco from the can't-say-I'm-surprised dept.
bachoom writes "Today, NIKKEI(Japanese story) announced that Turbolinux Inc. sold worldwide Linux business to SRA, Japanese SI company. Turbolinux has burned through at least $100 million raised across three rounds from a dazzling collection of companies including Intel, IBM, and many Japanese companies. Currently, They were sold by $1 million."
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Turbolinux Sells Linux Business More

Turbolinux Sells Linux Business

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  • what did someone forget to download it off an ftp site?
  • I use $0 to develop software, and $200+ once to be able to burn the cds it goes on?

    Maybe the companies selling Linux shouldn't be spending their money building but packaging it.

    • Marketing, web site, programmers, company logo t-shirts, office supplies, COMPUTERS...
      • Well, then that's why they lost money. They
        cannibalized the company. That's the wrong way to do business.
        If it weren't for Carly Fiorina's expertise in the Renaissance to recognize an opening in the tech market, I'd say HP-Compaq were dead. HP makes electronics. Compaq makes computers. HP-Compaq makes computers out of the electronics. Stupid, stupid, stupid. It's harder to sell a Mack truck than it is to sell a tire and harder to sell a PC than to sell a pair of speakers or a printer (even a cartridge at that).

  • I still use it....

    Small and fast install....

    I guess it's back to RedHat (going to lose the fast install and low footprint)
    • Just use SRA Linux when it comes out.
    • Duh, the poster didn't say it's dead, it just got sold to another company...

      I would have thought they were worth more than $1 mill though...

      Esp. with them being in bed with IBM so much that they have built different versions of their server distro for different IBM server platforms...

      Time to Babel that article...
    • Try Gentoo linux, you won't regret it : http://www.gentoo.org/

    • I guess it's back to RedHat (going to lose the fast install and low footprint)

      You ever bother choosing "Custom Install" in Red Hat? You can get as small a footprint as you want. As for fast install, that's completely useless for me, although your situation may be different. How often do you install? It's about once a year for me and I don't mind taking to the time to look through what's new when I do install. And you even get a kickstart file made automatically for you as a bonus. Makes installing on more than one box very quick.

      Using Red Hat will also give you something to bitch about, too, so there's an up side....

      -B

  • Sold their linux business? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Spudley ( 171066 ) on Tuesday August 20, 2002 @08:17AM (#4103755) Homepage Journal
    Turbolinux Sells Linux Business

    So does that mean they only sell turbos now?



  • Hmmmm...this should really help UnitedLinux. First Mandrake drops out, now TurboLinux is sold off. What next?

    • I doubt that this will really help UnitedLinux, because no one in the states really uses TurboLinux.

    • Re:UnitedLinux (Score:3, Insightful)

      by reaper20 ( 23396 )
      I don't think Mandrake dropped out, I think they never intented to join.

    • Re:UnitedLinux (Score:4, Funny)

      by jcoy42 ( 412359 ) on Tuesday August 20, 2002 @08:55AM (#4103996) Homepage Journal
      First Mandrake drops out, now TurboLinux is sold off. What next?

      Profit!
    • As others have mentioned, Mandrake didn't drop out of UL. They never joined in the first place.

      As for UL, the selling of Turbo's Linux business shouldn't mean anything. UL isn't TurboLinux; it's the combined effort of multiple different companies to produce a shared Linux base. I don't see any reason TurboLinux couldn't still participate in the UL effort. Just because a company does not sell a Linux distribution engineered in-house doesn't mean they can't participate in UL.
    • Question:
      Hmmmm...this should really help UnitedLinux. First Mandrake drops out, now TurboLinux is sold off. What next?
      Answer:
      Next UnitedLinux folds.
      There is bound to be a reason why these companies are failing.

  • sheesh....editors? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Raleel ( 30913 ) on Tuesday August 20, 2002 @08:19AM (#4103769)
    Good morning. Reread that submission. Talk it out. It doesn't have correct grammar.
    • > Reread that submission.

      How about rewriting it? I normally don't like to complain heavily
      about grammar in online forums, since the author may not be writing
      his first language, but when the grammar gets bad enough that I
      have substantial difficulty deciphering what was meant... Can
      someone please explain it to me in plain English? What business
      did TurboLinux sell? The whole company, or just a subset?
    • Have you ever noticed that the editors don't seem to edit the quoted text? I like that. I think they should take the best/first submission. Moreover, did you notice that the story was from a Japanese source? And that they "by/for" mistake is one easily made by someone who (probably) speaks more languages than you do? Did you have any trouble at all understanding the story? Would you prefer slashdot stories take another 8 hours to hit, so they can be vetted by an editor? Slashdot is ad hoc (both in the literal and colloquial sense of ad hoc...) news. If you want cleanly editted news, read ZDNet. Notice how they don't have as much variety or community?

      Just wondering.

      -Rob
      • Would you prefer slashdot stories take another 8 hours to hit, so they can be vetted by an editor?

        Yeah, the /. editors have more important things they have to be doing instead of editing blurbs like...like...coming up with new words for karma levels, and making sure that ads for .NET always show up on any anti-MS article they post. Oh, and coming up with new excuses to not cache the pages they link to. These things are more important to the community than you might think! Show some appreciation!

        If you want cleanly editted news, read ZDNet. Notice how they don't have as much variety or community?

        And I know that after I flame an editor for a crap post, and then I am flamed in return...God, my sense of community is tripled. God bless the /. XPerience!
    • Good morning. Reread that submission. Talk it out. It doesn't have correct grammar.

      Speaking as someone who is still waiting for that first cup of coffee, it looks just fine. :)

      Come on, it's *slashdot* and it's *early* (at least here). If you want good grammer, I think you're at the wrong place at the wrong time.
    • Honestly -- this is probably a symptom of having read Slashdot way too much for way too long but it didn't even strike me as particularly off.

      It certainly didn't grate on me the way "now owned by Apple and endorced into MacOSX", from the helpfully titled Adam Fedor of GNUstep Says Stuff [slashdot.org], did.

  • If I were just to judge off their LINUX Mags over here I would say turbolinux just got hooked up. An average issue weighs in at nearly 180 pages. That's 50% larger than this month's Journal not to mention the extra density of text in the Japanese Language. ...

  • What was TurboLinux? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by mbourgon ( 186257 )
    I remember it mentioned once or twice, but it had about zero mindshare for me.

    Here's my thoughts on the different distros. YMWV:
    Mandrake - easy to run version of Red Hat
    Red Hat - standard distro, supposed to be really cool but I can never get to work right
    SuSE - YAST2 is cool
    Debian - bitch to install, cake to keep up; apt-get
    Slackware - some sort of hard core linux
    Turbolinux - *shrug*

    What was TurboLinux known for?
      1. Asian language support.
      2. High-availability clustering.

      I don't know much about their clustering software, but I doubt that it was of the caliber of any commercial offerings of the old-school UNIX players.

      From what I understand, Compaq Tru64 UNIX (formerly known as Digital UNIX, formerly known as Digital OSF/1) has the very best clustering capabilities in the industry. The native Tru64 filesystem, AdvFS, can be mounted by multiple UNIX systems at the same time, which eases cluster maintenance considerably. AdvFS is one of the important components of Tru64 that will be migrated to HP-UX (but this work is going very badly, from what I understand).

      Supposedly, Oracle is releasing a clustering file system for Linux under the GPL, and it seems similar in capabilities to AdvFS. HP also has ported their MC/ServiceGuard software (the normal high-availability component of HP-UX) to Linux. With this kind of competetion, I can see why Turbolinux is hard-pressed in the clustering software arena.

      • AdvFS is one of the important components of Tru64 that will be migrated to HP-UX (but this work is going very badly, from what I understand).

        I'm not suprised; AdvFS had to have a lot of hooks deep into Tru64 that probably don't (or really can't) translate over to HPUX. AdvFS is cool: I didn't get to spend a lot of time with it but loved how solid the filesystem (and the OS) performed, whether on RAID, JBOD or otherwise. Particularly, I liked AdvFS method of file domains, adding another level to partitioning. It was REAL simple to create quickie test filedomains for small storage areas without having to format/partition/whatnot.

        Comparatively, 64-but HPUX is still quite infantile compared to OSF/Tru64. I think HP is making some mistakes in ASSuming they can incorporate some technologies so easily (TruCluster, AdvFS) while throwing away the rest of such a solid OS.

        But that's just my unemployed $0.02...
        • I think HP is making some mistakes in ASSuming they can incorporate some technologies so easily (TruCluster, AdvFS) while throwing away the rest of such a solid OS.

          One of the many reasons I have started to refer to HomPaq as "Unisys - The Next Generation." I figure that they'll be down to a contract service firm within the next ten years or so.

      • just wanted to point out that one of the other things that turbo was well known for is their prowess on linux for 390 / z-series.

        cheers.

        Peter
      • Actually, my experience of Tru64's TruCluster is that it violates the good old engineering principle of Keep It Simple, Stupid. And it shows. In a failure situation it hasnt been rare that the entire cluster locks up, rather than one machine crashing and the rest taking over the load.

        Compared to the incredibly simplistic solution with MC/ServiceGuard, the differences in total uptime shows. ServiceGuard doesnt have near the features that TruCluster does, but it does (eventually) get the applications up and running again on another node.

        Which is sortof the point of HA solutions.

        Clustering filesystems are not stable yet. They may be in a few years, but for now, ignore them unless you like working weekends. I can think of very very few problems they solve well enough to be worth the screaming mindsearing _pain_ they cause. Stick with the mindbogglingly annoying solution of using NFS instead, if you have to have multiple mounts of a filesystem.
    • Google is your friend... Look at DistroWatch [distrowatch.com]. I thoguht Turbo initially was a distro that would try to tailor to your arch a little better, thus perform better.. but I think they turned into another standard GUI-based Mandrake/Redhat pretty install.

      You forgot Gentoo - Even more hard core than Slackware; use if you are into watching your machine stroke out in a compile-fest. emerge is your friend. It's neat to watch my spare box (Celery466) sit off to the side mired in building KDE from scratch. :)

    • Stupid troll can't make any distro work except Mandrake. Where is the insight? He probably reinstalls from scratch every two days because it won't boot into X anymore...

      MOD HIM DOWN.
      TROLL.
      KILL.

      BAD MODERATOR. NO DONUT.
      • Hey, at least I didn't lose any karma on that. Actually, I ran Debian (first CLOS, then Debian) for about 2 years, decided to try out Lycoris, hated that, went Red Hat (um, why doesn't redhat-network-config get installed by default?), over to Mandrake (using currently), and am playing with SuSE.

        Oddly enough, X died a week or so ago on my Mandrake box, so I'll go fix later this week, when I have some time. Why is it my fault if I install an EASY TO USE distro and then I don't want to learn all the intracacies in order to get a GUI? This is why Linux isn't on the desktop yet.

        My goal on playing with all the distros periodically is to find one that our end users could deal with, and that would make a nice, easy, friendly workstation/server for me. So that I don't ever need Windows.

        Oh and the insight - the original question. What the hell differentiates TurboLinux? (Now I know - Japanese support)

        And some more -

        Lycoris - really wants to be XP.
        CLOS - Only OS I'd trust my parents with, even outdated as it is (and yes, I config'd it to update packages - and that broke it utterly)
        Xandros - if it ever comes out, will be the OS I give my parents.
        Gentoo - a true roll your own linux. It'll finish compiling next week. ;)
    • They did two things. Optimized the kernel for the processors out of the box, and clustered web servers. The web server thing was their big seller, as it let you cluster web servers running any OS's, like one Linux, one Solaris, one Windows. Pretty cool technology, but they weren't a big seller here in the US.
    • Others have mentioned Asian language support and clustering. To that list I'll add this: the first functional (albeit ugly) IA64 Linux distro. As much as other Linux companies would deny it, I'm going to guess that every one of them that has an IA64 implementation has "borrowed" a few things from Turbo's IA64 offering. At least the early versions of the distros had LOTS of RPMs with "[Tt]urbo[Ll]inux" somewhere in the headers (for all I know, many still do).

  • Wait... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Rayonic ( 462789 ) on Tuesday August 20, 2002 @08:29AM (#4103838) Homepage Journal
    So they spent about $100 million in investor money, and now they're being sold for $1 million. In today's economy, doesn't that mean they turned a net profit?
    • So they spent about $100 million in investor money,
      and now they're being sold for $1 million.
      In today's economy, doesn't that mean they turned a net profit?

      That would depend on how good their accounting firm is.

      :^)

  • New business-model? (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    1: Raise $100 million to sell free stuff.
    2: ?
    3: Sell for $1 million.
    4: Profit!

    Hmmm...wait a minute! There is something wrong with the picture here.

  • I'm suprised it took this long (Score:4, Insightful)

    by richj ( 85270 ) on Tuesday August 20, 2002 @08:33AM (#4103864)
    I can't really say I'm suprised that they pissed away 100 million in venture capital. Their sales guys seemed to having an adverse reaction to SELLING.

    I met with TurboLinux at LinuxWorld 1999 in NYC, this was during the big Linux boon. I was working as an independant consultant, and I had a Fortune 500 client looking to pilot Linux on file and print servers.

    The TurboLinux salesguys were flat out fucking rude to me when I told him that I was evaluating different distros to present in my solution. "Oh that's great, just download it and go and install it, what's the big deal?" or some shit he said to me. Idiot had absolutely no idea how business works, if I brought him into my client we both would have been out the door.

    Anyway, I wound up running with RedHat (a distro that my client paid for on all systems). I'm not saying that my client expected World Series tickets for a few grand in licensing, but when you have people like that working the booth at a tradeshow it's not the type of people you'd bring into a large and established New York City company.

  • obligatory (Score:4, Funny)

    by kin_korn_karn ( 466864 ) on Tuesday August 20, 2002 @08:40AM (#4103912) Homepage
    TL1: What happen?
    TL2: Somebody set up us the merger.
    TL3: We get signal
    SRA: How are you gentlemen?
    SRA: All your rinux are belong to us
    TL1: what you say !!
    • TL1: What happen?
      TL2: Somebody set up us the merger.
      TL3: We get signal
      SRA: How are you gentlemen?
      SRA: All your rinux are belong to us
      TL1: what you say !!
      You are a true comedy genius ! What do you think of this one ?

      step 1: put $ 100m into software distributed for free
      step 2:?????????
      setp 3: PROFIT !!!!

      I can't believe you and I are so funny...
    • For once, ROTFL especially for rinux part! :)

      Anyone doesn't know where that "rinux" comes, check http://www.engrish.com ;-)
  • I mean they were sold by $1 million... I wonder what the other $99 million are doing... prolly looking for new jobs ever since that dick head $1 million sold them all.
  • So Long TurboLinux, and thanks for all the sushi!
  • Step 1: Create Linux Distro

    Step 2: ????

    Step 3: Profit

  • 1. Start Company

    2. Spent $100 million

    3. Profit?
  • It is not in the story. Do you mean it was sold for $1mill or what? Scooped the story quick, but I'm skeptical of that figure.

    LR
  • Yet another story of a Linux company in trouble or quitting altogether. Looks like the Linux revolution is taking a bit longer than originally expected ...
  • That is possibly the most confusing story description I've ever read on Slashdot.

    And before my morning coffee, too! Bad Slashdot, bad, no Warcraft for you today!
  • I'd like to thank Bachoom (the author of the little blurb) for all his excellent work in writing car manuals and stero instructions (Do not to the measurement! There will be a great occurence!) I say this to all my Japanese friends - use the grammer checker, dude.

    Babelfish translation of the story itself (his link) is pretty incomprehensible - don't bother, but let me clarify: SRA bought the entire company, 100% of the stock. SRA will continue to operate in an independent fashion, however, at least for a while (I think).

    Does Turbolinux have any debts, or was all the venture capital stock purchases?

    We can all agree that TurboLinux inc. was a financial failure of epic proportions (distro was good, I think). The question is - did SRA make a good buy for their $1 million dollars? I don't know much about SRA, but they seem to provide Linux-based consultancy in Japan, where Turbolinux is a very popular distro. If their core consultancy (and training? I can barely read japanese - the corporate babble on the SRA website is utterly incomprehensible) business is viable at all, and TLinux remains popular in Japan, I think this was an excellent buy.
    • Choke. Sorry.

      SRA will continue to operate in an independent fashion, however, at least for a while (I think).

      Turbolinux will continue to operate in an independent fashion. It's morning, my bad. The irony of mocking someone's bad syntax and then getting words reversed in my own posting is not lost on me.

  • Wanted: /. Editor (Experience with English a plus) (Score:4, Funny)

    by Lindril ( 68371 ) on Tuesday August 20, 2002 @09:02AM (#4104060) Homepage
    "Currently, They were sold by $1 million."

    All your base are belong to us.

  • TurboLinux (Score:5, Interesting)

    by BJH ( 11355 ) on Tuesday August 20, 2002 @09:03AM (#4104071)
    TurboLinux was probably the third distributions I tried out (after Red Hat 4.2 and Red Hat 5.0).

    TurboLinux (the organization) started out as a Japanese company named Pacific HiTech, a small CD-retail house that sold compilations of Mac freeware/shareware, X Window software... basically anything that they could shovel onto a CD for no cost and sell for a few bucks.

    The original TurboLinux 1.0 was only available in Japan. It was a Red Hat 4.2-based distribution with some Japanese extensions, and it was pretty crappy. I still have the box sitting around somewhere, I think - at the time, it retailed for somewhere around 10,000-20,000 yen ($US80-$US160).

    This was followed by version 1.4, an upgrade to 1.0 that pretty much consisted of package updates.

    The next version, 2.0, raised some ire in the Japanese Linux community - it cost more than 1.0, there was no upgrade path, and they gave no discount to people who had bought the 1.0 retail box.

    After that, I lost interest in it as a distribution - their quality control seemed to be non-existent, there was a huge rift between the Japanese and American development arms that usually left the Japanese distribution several package revisions behind, and it was still just a fairly normal Red Hat derivative.

    I actually met Cliff Miller, the CEO of TurboLinux (and the original founder of Pacific HiTech), at a FreeBSD meeting in Tokyo - yes, Pacific HiTech used to be the official publisher of the Japanese version of FreeBSD! Of course, he dropped FreeBSD like a hot potato when Linux took off, wrote a book about his work as an "Open Source pioneer", sold the company for pots of money and retired.

    All in all, I say good riddance - TurboLinux, we never really needed you...
  • Did anyone actually use this distro, or is it just one of those links at LinuxIso.org that nobody clicks on?
  • As we begin to reach the tail end of the dotcom bubble bust, it can only be expected that this part of the business sector would be hit as well. This is the nature of a contraction for an over inflated market and industry consolidation. If the fact they spent $100mil with little to show for it surprises you, you might want to watch Lou Dobbs and company. No one should be surprised that this is happening in this portion of the OS and services sector. This type of shake out of companies and faulty business models was inevitable. Secondly, I agree with many in the statement of "You spent how much!? And were sold for how much?!" But that is why they call it "Venture Capital". It is high risk investment, with the potential for high risk loss. (But at least it is not as much as WorldCOM recorded.) Unfortunately, it appears as if the High Tech industry is hitting a plateau in many areas as this market phase finally unfolds for true. With some what flat and/or declining sales for markets across the board (back to Lou Dobbs and earnings reports) one must expect that the true high risk/developing business will see a shrinkage of dollars to keep them afloat during these troubled. Thus you will see many low bid buy-outs of this nature. Finally, the really troubling issue will be the state of US tax revenue and the deficit. When these big companies, (aka IBM, Intel, etc) take the big dollar write offs against there taxable revenue for these failed projects/investments. The reduced revenue from these write offs could translate into high taxes for you and me when this hits. Think on that one.
  • They actually had a clue once. At one point Terpstra (when he was head of Engineering) was putting together packages of solutions with vendors (open and closed) who could support their applications in an enterprise setting. He was going to make a compelling reason for business xyz or reseller abc to deploy TurboLinux. IIRC a firewall/vpn solution, a mailserver, several databases, etc... Unlike RedHat or VALinux who refused to acknowledge that businesses might use closed source software, and that one of the big reasons that any company would switch to Linux is because they don't have to pay for Solaris or HPUX, and the accompanying RISC hardware or deal with NTs issues in order to run their software, Terpstra thought that if Oracle or DB2 or Checkpoint or whatever would run on Linux reliably and at a fraction of the cost of a big vendor *NIX system, they might get deployed in a business or two.

    I was going in to meet with him with our BizDev team, and their "young-boy network" marketing tool guy whizzes by. Terpstra stops to introduce us and the guy goes "Yeah, company ZZZ - we love your hardware!"

    We were a software company.

    Not that this kid's supposed to know who we were at a chance meeting, but you'd think a VP of marketing would've had a clue about product development/management. His callous superiority complex really turned us off (I was the most forgiving of my team), and you could tell the TurboLinux folks we were with were rather embarrased by the VP of marketing. Not to terribly denegrate the guy, but my point is that they once had someone with a plan to make some money or at least try to gain some market share, but got caught up in their arrogance and "valuations".

    Not a few months later they horizontally promote Terpstra to community mouthpiece, totally wasting him. I hear he's at Caldera now. At least Caldera has the Mormon network of businesses to sell and support.

    After that, TurboLinux fails to get any traction in services (gee, you mean a business would rather get support for Red Hat from Red Hat?) and it was just a matter of time.

    Man, I remember Pacific High Tech when they had a lady working out of her house as their US rep. It's way too bad they fell so hard, I really liked some folks there.

  • Here's a quick'n'dirty translation of the article:

    The major system developer, SRA, bought out TurboLinux Japan, a large Linux distributor (head office: Shibuya, Tokyo) on 2002/08/20. The company obtained 100% of TurboLinux Japan's shares. TurboLinux USA has effectively sold the Japanese corporation to SRA. TurboLinux Japan will remain in existence as a corporate entity.

    SRA is known as a system development company strong in the field of open source, including Linux. TurboLinux Japan had a large share of the domestic Linux market as a home-grown Linux distributor. However, in the one or two years following the collapse of the Linux bubble", it lost direction, undergoing restructuring and changes in leadership.
    • Thank you for translating the article for those of us who do not speak Japanese. From your translation, it appears that the majority of posts here are operating on a false assumption.

      In fact, only one function of one international office was sold. Distributing Linux has not been TurboLinux's main business plan for years; instead, it seeks to sell application and server software built on Linux.

      This does not appear to be any major change to their business plan or any major sell-off of assets. The office involved was not closed and continues to function, as does the main company. It is apparently nowhere near the end of the road.

      --
      Tim Maroney tim@maroney.org

  • Someone cue the Queen baseline... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by MidKnight ( 19766 ) on Tuesday August 20, 2002 @09:22AM (#4104247)
    "Dum dum dum ... another one bites the dust."

    Hindsight being 20-20 and all, but I don't think this should surprise anyone. During the late 90's lots of techies were excited about Linux because of the freedom it gave them in twiddling the bits of modern operating system themselves. Meanwhile, lots of venture capitalists & MBA's were excited because they saw in Linux an opportunity to start up their own personal Microsoft with virtually zero resources allocated to creating a product. So, throw some marketing $$$ at it, ride the wave, and soon they'd have their own fiefdom of clients running their operating system. They could leverage that installed base to make related deals and rake in the cash.

    So, between the techies & the MBA's, who do you think is still excited? (Rhetorical question)

    Now, enter popular Linux-related business plan #2: selling a "solution" instead of a software product. Great plan, right? IBM Global Services does that to the tune of $35 billion in revenue! Yeah, but IBM uses their huge hardware profit margins to seed their services plans. Plus they already had Fortune 100 clients as part of their previously installed base to draw from. Oh yeah, and they also have freaking enormous economies of scale to use as well.

    My point to this little ramble is that most Linux distros suffer from overly optimistic business plans that, especially in today economy, just don't work. If a Linux distribution is the shining center of your business plan, then in the end you'll be forced to sit at the children's table when it comes to dividing up the revenue pie. So, stories like TurboLinux are pretty common these days, and probably will continue to be for the forseeable future.

    Now where'd I put that Queen CD....

    --Mid
    • As long as the distributions keep coming, and stay GPL, it's worth it.

      It would be really nice to have a fortune, but I don't waste my money on lottery tickets. What Linux buys, what the GPL buys, is freedom. I need to make a living too, and dreams are nice. But I can make a living working for someone else, as long as the software is Linux, and if I help them succeed, I'm still moving it forwards.

      Now, in acutality, I'm in a basically windows shop, and I only have two copies of Linux installed at work, one of them dual-boot. But I have been refusing to install Windows software over license issues. Most people think I'm crazy, and that the licenses don't matter, but not all. Not anymore. Too much evidence. So by keeping Linux present, I'm keeping an option open.
      Currently I'm moving a project from MS Access to Java. Well, Java isn't perfect, but it's cross-platform. And that's another application that isn't tied to windows. Every step helps.

      So, TurboLinux had a bad business model or method. Too bad. I wish that they had been more successful. I hope that they are successful as a part of the new corporation. But if not, it sounds like there are Korean and Chinese distributions coming up that could fill their footsteps. And appearantly China intends to honor the GPL. (If they didn't, it wouldn't be Linux, no matter what it said on the box.)

  • Is it possible the current quality in linux has come about because of Tech investment bubble? That is all those investment dollars that never led to a profit did go to pay salaries of programmers who helped advance Linux and Gnu and all the other parts of the distributions.

    We may not want to admit this but maybe this is what allowed LINUX to catch up to Microsoft in userfreindlyness and establish a minimal set of applications. For example, would star office or any of the other office suites have reached their final form or have even tech support available had not their hosting companies like Sun profited from the surge of investment cash?

    Sure you might point to some app that was a good bussiness decision for a company to have produced in hindsight, but how many other compaines tried and died in the mean time. I argue that it was the tech bubble the allowed experimentation and risk taking to creat these apps

    Since the tech bubble has popped maybe so will the explosion in linux software and linux quality. If so then it might be reasonable to ask if the linux and possibly gnu (anti-) bussiness models, indeed the whole free-software movement will no longer be good models.

    open source may survive but it will look more like a BSD model rather than a GPL.

    • You have some good points. I don't know that I agree that all of the quality software came from investment captial, however. I do think that some of the major steps forward did, and I am positive that the buzz generated attracted more quality developers than ever before.

      I disagree that it will all go away, since it existed before venture capital, and will continue to exist after venture capital. Some people have an actual opinion about their OS now, and that is an improvement worth any amount of money. Nobody considered that 5 years ago. I worked in a business where we ran OS/2 in order to use SNA, host emulation, and remote desktop control and we were ridiculed. We then went to Windows, and suffered seriously. Windows wasn't ready then, and is barely ready now.

      I think that the companies who have realized that there are actual choices in platform are the biggest winners. It's no longer rubberstamp. There is now that moment of hesitation... MS Access, or Postgres? Should I use x, or y for our firewall?

      Let's also not forget that Linux as an embedded OS is taking major strides. It's everything a lot of people want in an embedded OS.

      So I don't agree that it's over. I think that it will just adjust.

      -WS

  • The Japanese, in a new marketing strategy, have decided to change the name from TurboLinux to Supaa Numbaa 1 Happy Cow Bang Lucky Henshin Mega Turbo Linux!!!

  • It's pure evolution baby. The winner is the last one breathing. And the prize is dominion over the boneyard.

    Sheesh there used to be a real computer industry now it's just some shitty Soviet monopoly and everthing else is on life support. And the monopoly is on life support too.
  • I can think of some pretty cool stuff to do with 100 meeelion dollars. Reinventing the wheel is not one of them. Can you imagine if you invested 100 million into applications and left the distributions to the community? If I had a nickel for every dollar spent on making an "easier install" I could hire some pretty good people for a long time to work on some real apps. Think about it -- even a bad install would only take a day or two....What really would stand out is what do you do once you have it installed? That could be years of usage -- vs. the difference between a 1 hour install and a 2 day install.

    On the flipside -- the Eazel (sp?) people seemed to be pretty good at floating many million into what in the end was little more than a slow file manager. Proving that not only distributions can go broke. I say if you have that kind of money -- take it and pay the people (teams) who are already working part time on existing "killer areas" (gimp, sane, usb support, abiword, gnumeric, etc) and pay them to do it fulltime as a real job with real deadlines, etc...etc...

  • ..."who the hell uses Turbolinux?"

    I do.

    It's like Redhat without the bullshit. It has great console-based configuration programs. It's i686 optimized (no longer that big of a deal though).

    I hope this sale won't affect my favorite distro :(

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