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VA buys LHS, Enlightened Solutions 93

Posted by justin++ from the nice-bg-info dept.
Lazzaro wrote in with the most exciting thing I've seen all day: A TechWeb article about VA (Research) buying Linux Hardware Solutions and mandrake's company, Enlightened Solutions. It goes on to say VA will regroup into three separate groups: an apparently RHAD-like development division, a web unit for Linux.com, and a systems group.
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VA buys LHS, Enlightened Solutions More

VA buys LHS, Enlightened Solutions

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  • Wine?

    No, it's a native Linux X windows app.

    It's very nice, imports and exports ms word with no problem (not that I give a flying f*** about ms word, but a lot of docs get sent to me in that format)

    I like it better than Applix words or StarWriter!

    jjs

  • Big Deal (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    VA isn't even a Dell - the laptops they sell are simply repurchased NECs that you pay them a premium simply to install linux on.

    And what is this crap about "optimized for linux"? Did they somehow optimize the Intel Pentium II to run linux faster? Or are SCSI boards all of a sudden the exclusive domain of linux?

    VA buys stocks components that any of you can buy and slaps them together in a steel box.

    I love it when I see Rob's comment in the ad - Damn VA - this box is too fast! - he could have made the identical box himself with one trip to Fry's.

  • Where is the Money From? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    They got venture capital from Intel and Sequoia (those guys that invested in Yahoo).

    But I wonder: how much of the deal was cash and how much was in stock? They're not public yet, but there's A LOT going for them. It'd be interesting if it was a mostly-stock deal: did the companies sell at a lower (present) price in hopes of a big upside? Or is VA Research's stock's already being priced high by their BoD?

    Who's IPO will be bigger: Red Hat or VA? :-)

  • Risks of corporate-ization of Linux (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It appears that Red Hat and VA Research now have real potential to "hit it big". Given the current media buzz about Linux, it seems likely that an IPO would (or should I say will!) make these guys very very rich.

    I admit to being a little unsettled by this possibility. While both companies have acquired a fair amount of serious Linux talent in recent months, I can't help feeling that they are to some extent still cherry picking the financial rewards of the Linux development community, without having to do any of the "heavy lifting".

    I don't think VA Research has been much of a force in Linux development, though they hope to change that (though that raises its own issues). Red Hat has more history to it... and RPM is nice... but I don't see them as having made any really decisive contributions to date.

    I'm concerned that if VA and/or Red Hat go public, and hit market caps of a substantial fraction of a billion dollars, that this will fundamentally change the nature of their relationship with the Linux development community that has sustained them until now. Going from the other end of the spectrum, Sun has announced that they will open much of the source code for Solaris... but who wants to hack on that, when Sun will reap most of the financial rewards? What happens when the market christens VA or Red Hat as the corporate face of Linux, and the bucks really start to flow? Will the development community dry up? Could the code base become another Mozilla project, where people can't clearly distinguish the "common good" from the "corporate good"?
  • There are still soft spots for Linux, however. For example, there are no name-brand desktop productivity applications available for it yet, though Lotus is considering a port of SmartSuite.

    WordPerfect isn't name-brand? WordPerfect was the word processor for years. IMHO, WP 5.1 was the best word processor ever created.

    I'd agree that there are few name-brand desktop apps, but none is incorrect.

  • Big Deal (Score:1)

    by joey ( 315 )
    > VA buys stocks components that any of you can
    > buy and slaps them together in a steel box.

    You'd prefer to buy a system from some big name like IBM or Compaq or Pacard Bell that uses special non-standard components and locks you into using their proprietory hardware? I think most people here have already decided buying from a small vendor is a better idea.

    But those small vendors often skimp on quailty hardware, and they certianly don't select the components that work well with linux.

    VA is a very happy mean between the two, you get standard hardware that's high quaility and has been chosen to work well with linux. Of course the linux stickers on the VA systems are a nice extra.

    What really wowed me about my VA system, though, were two things. It came with spare mounting rails, and a screws that must be replacements for every single screw in the whole box. Best of all, it came with a manual - a big 2 inch thick monster that mist be 600 pages long, and that contained excellent linux-specific information tailored to my machine, and complete documentation of every board in it.

    Frankly, the manual made me happily nostalgic to the days when all computers came with a Real Manual and programming information. Bravo VA!
  • When I was working the Debian booth at LinuxWorld Expo, Larry Augustin came by and asked how we would feel about being paid to maintain Debian full time. Any software generated would be GPL'd.

    Yep, paying people to do something they're already doing for free or to write software and then give it away, it's that ol' Microsoft business model rearing its ugly head again...

  • Just bear in mind that you are not the only one with such concerns. My understanding (which may be wrong) is that one reason Larry wanted LHS is in order to bring some hard-core Linux people on-board so that these kinds of concerns can get hashed out internally in a way that benefits the Linux community.
    My impression is that the top guys at VA Research are well aware that without the support of the Linux community, they're just another computer company in a market already swamped with computer companies.

  • I have no inside information on this (I am not a VA Research employee -- yet), but I think you may see something come out of the Flextronics manufacturing agreement here. Flextronics is great at turning out large quantities of standard boxen for a low price.

    Interestingly enough, the configuration of a low-end IDE-based firewall machine is quite similar to that of a home machine -- just replace the second network card with a sound card, and voila!
  • Hmm, they have the guy behind the powerbook onboard as their VP of engineering.

    Major Clue?
  • Granted, the OS/2 version uses Open32 so the Linux version would probably use Wine, but I don't expect Lotus to do anything that intelligent.

    Timur, I think you got your facts a bit off here: wine is analagous to Win32-OS/2 in functionality, rather than Open32. With the additional understanding that like the last version of Win32-OS/2, something like pe2lx.exe is not necessary.

    This is stuff I'd assume you know (being on the former Win32-OS/2 team, and all), but you don't write things to wine, you write things to Win32 and have them run under wine.

    And WordPerfect does not run under wine.
  • > these don't have the generic title "productivity
    > software" for nuttin'.

    gcc is productivity software. word is for writing memos...

  • Oh joy. (Score:2)

    by Scott ( 1049 )
    Since when is consolidation a good thing? Unless you own a piece of the company it's a terrible thing. Remember, less competition means higher prices, the MS trial should have shown people that by now. Not that VA could possibly make their systems any more overpriced.
  • Office Apps were available Linux 3 YEARS ago, in some places at retail. It's really old news and quite tiresome FUD. There has been a version of WP for Linux since version 6. Version 8 is not THAT spectacular. Applix has been available for Linux
    for quite some time as has been StarOffice (gratis).

    Besides, these things haven't progressed much farther beyond their PageStream/WP 4.1 forebears. Most of what these people do with their machines (appwise) is MacSE territory.

    Take away their games and their actual, real computational needs would be quite miniscule.
  • I want to replace appfoo vs. I need appfoo.
  • I assume VA knows a lot more than me (or Dell or whatever) about which components works best with Linux, which drivers to install, and how to assemble the box. I could perhaps find out, but I bet it would be a lot more cost-efficient to pay VA to do the work instead.
  • I probably won't ever find this out.. But I really would like to understand thier financial model.

    Somehow, I don't believe that VA is hiring all these people and buying all this stuff from it's own profits.

    I thing it's gotta be either that have a friendly banker who believes in thier buisness plan and they are getting pretty deep in debt, or there is some huge outside investor that is hopping they come through and make him rich or something...

    Anyone point to a detailed report of where the money comes from?

  • If the Linux version of SmartSuite is anything like the OS/2 version, then trust me - you DON'T want it. Granted, the OS/2 version uses Open32 so the Linux version would probably use Wine, but I don't expect Lotus to do anything that intelligent.

    --
    Timur Tabi
    Remove "nospam_" from email address
  • You seem to be forgetting that Wine has two seperate parts.

    An "emulator" of sorts, which is the more well known part, and libraries used to port applications.

    Wordperfect is going to be using the latter. They use Winelib to help port the applications.
  • The bracket notation in articles is used by writers and editors to add context and meaning when quoting a source. Sometimes verbal communication in an interview does not translate well to text since there is alot of 'hand waving' and other nonverbal things going on. Also, they guy just might not be a good speaker or very articulate, but an interviewer can still get the gist of what he's saying while the transcipt would be harder to parse.

  • Microsoft (Score:3)

    by Streib ( 4105 ) on Tuesday April 27, 1999 @06:37PM (#1912863) Homepage
    Let me try to understand this:

    1) Microsoft is big
    2) Microsoft employs anti-competitive tactics
    3) Linux emerges
    4) Microsoft is no longer invincible
    5) Any linux company that makes money is like Microsoft

    Ahh.... if that's the way it goes, then remind me never to try to make any money in the Linux market. I might be accused of trying to get a monopoly.
  • Or was that a strange artical? I mean one moment it's talking about VA research then it's off on a FUD trip about lack of applications. I'm not trying to attack the autor here. But if you're going to write a piece about VA shouldn't it be mainly about VA?
  • I'll bet more people today use Wordperfect then do VisiCalc. To say Wordperfect is not a noticable market share would be wrong. It may not be number one but it's on the charts.
  • The Lothar Project [slashdot.org] is from Linux Mandrake [linux-mandrake.com] (the distro). VA bought Enlightened Solutions from mandrake [mandrake.net] (the person), who we all know from his work on Enlightenment (Enlightened Solutions, get it...)
  • "There are still soft spots for Linux, however. For example, there are no name-brand desktop productivity applications available for it yet, though Lotus is considering a port of SmartSuite."
  • Intel invested in VA and thier site they say they are on track to IPO (which leads me to believe there are VCs involved as well).

    --

  • What about Alpha support? (Score:3)

    by Mark Evans ( 6036 ) on Tuesday April 27, 1999 @03:02PM (#1912869) Homepage
    I hope VA will consider supporting Alpha based systems (as Linux HW does). Rack mount Alpha's would be great for ISPs. Of course, I have no clue if they'd actually sell...

    --

  • From the horse... (Score:4)

    by Kit Cosper ( 7007 ) on Tuesday April 27, 1999 @04:04PM (#1912870) Homepage Journal
    I'd just like to make sure that everyone understands that this relationship is the result of a lot of work and many, many hours of discussion. As both companies have grown we're facing new challenges, and we have come to the conclusion that a joint approach is the most effective way to meet these challenges. This deal will allow the new VA to keep pace with the explosive growth in the community while continuing to provide exceptional customer satisfaction.


    --Kit

  • Mandrake's company enlightened solutions inc. was not a competeitor to VA. He was working on a high availability web server (apache) that suported rollover and distributed usage...
  • Hot on the heels of the Lothar Hardware Recognition Project which Mandrake announced. This could be the start of a beautiful relationship; I can't wait to see what VA and Mandrake can do together!
  • > With any luck, the collaboration with LHS will
    > result in them selling boxes that a home user
    > would actually think of buying. And I hope those
    > VA guys don't forget where they came from, and
    > don't forget about the starving college kids who
    > can't afford ...

    Since when did starving college kids buy from
    'big name' vendors?

    Point 'starving college kids' to
    http://www.pricewatch.com and they can find
    useful cheap boxes sold with Linux for under
    US$350. That's simply not the target market of
    VA Research.

    VA might sell $350 Linux boxes when HP and SGI
    sell $350 systems too...

    Jonathan
  • But as one reseller said, "Where is Office for Linux?"

    And as Accipiter said, "Who Cares?"

    -- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

  • There are also *linux* vendors that sell cheap boxes for home users. I got mine from TCU-inc .These guys can sell you a machine ( with a monitor and ZIP drive ) for under $1000-. If you work out how much it costs you to build it yourself, you'll find that it's not much cheaper. There are a pile of other shops that have decent prices ( ASL, SWT, and even Penguin nowadays. LHS aren't so bad either ... ). I think it's a pity that VA are getting all the hype, because they don't sell anything that the home user wants.

    I tend to treat the "miracle prices" on pricewatch with scepticism nowadays ( I am disputing an item on my credit card bill ... ) I always go to resellerratings.com before making purchases.

  • Boxen for home users ? (Score:3)

    by elflord ( 9269 ) on Tuesday April 27, 1999 @09:38PM (#1912876) Homepage
    With any luck, this means VA ( who are the ones with the big name ) will start selling some computers that ordinary people can afford. It's a pity to see so many newbies who ask "where can I buy a linux box" being pointed to VAResearch, who sell hardware that is out of the budget of most home users (who don't need U2W SCSI).

    With any luck, the collaboration with LHS will result in them selling boxes that a home user would actually think of buying. And I hope those VA guys don't forget where they came from, and don't forget about the starving college kids who can't afford their U2W Xeon screamer ... it would be a shame to see them forgetting about their roots in the process of getting big.

  • >a little software company from Redmond started
    >sorta like VA. I am going to have to wait and see >on this one.
    If you mean it was started by a college student disatified by current hardware, ironically, you're thinking of sun. If I remember my silicon valley history correctly, a bunch of grad students were upset with the quality, cost, or existence of workstations, so they founded Sun. And now, these VA guys found a company because Sun's cost workstations cost too much.

    The legend of MS is that ole Billy Boy got his start selling PCs out of his car at Harvard, or whatever school he dropped out of.
  • Don't hate the player hate the game...



  • He was kidding...

    Of course he wants to kick back at home and write cool apps and get paid, who wouldnt?


  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • VA has plenty of competition. Dell, IBM, (does compaq bundle linux?). Everyone is rooting for the first to back Linux, thats all. And the buying of Mandrake isn't gobbling a competitor, one's hardware ones software. Just my $00.02

    Erik
  • Regardless of the whining and paranoia I think that growth for Linux companies is good. It proves that Linux is growing and that the Open Source model works. The stronger we can get those companies the better it will be for all linux users.

    It flies in the face of MS FUD and since MS is on FUD campaign in the press recently b/c they are scared of linux, we need all of the DE-FUDDING we can get. As long as we keep seeing stuff like "Linux is the number one choice of ISP's" the safer we are.
    ********************************************
    Superstition is a word the ignorant use to describe their ignorance. -Sifu
  • As it happens, this is exactly what I did. :-)

    D

    ----
  • As far as I can tell, this is a lot like "IBM buys Compaq" - it's a merger, and mergers have a nasty tendancy of reducing competition and producing all sorts of ugly growing pains in both companies.

    What's good about this news? What it means to me is fewer options and less consumer choice.

    Of course I might just be bummed by the fact that I wanted to recommend a VA Research system to a client, but they wanted a far lower-end machine than VA provides. What happened to their $ 1,300 machine? It was all this small company really needed.

    D

    ----

  • Great News! (Score:3)

    by lnevo ( 10937 ) on Tuesday April 27, 1999 @03:03PM (#1912885)
    This is the best news I've ever heard. I have always been glad that VA Research and Linux Hardware Solutions have been out there selling boxes with Linux from the get-go, and I was a bit worried that all the support we've gotten from Dell, Compaq, IBM, and HP that these vendors would get lost in the shuffle. But now with VA Research making itself much bigger, I'm quite sure they will stand strong amidst all the competition.
  • After some trial and error, you can turn off most of the autoformatting crap and get it back in Word 6.0 compatiblity mode. Once there, Word's actually an excellent word processor.

    Me types: "To Do List:"

    Clippy materalizes: "It looks like you are typing a letter. Do you want to launch the Letter Writing Wizard?"
    --
  • Fortunately there are some other companies that produce good linux boxes. One that I found (although I have yet to use there hardware...can someone who has tell me how good it is) and am planning on purchasing a system is Penguin Computing. Their low end machines can start at about $1300 (PII, 64meg ram, 10gig hard drive). Maybe you can suggest them to your customer.

    Rhavyn
  • Mandrake announced it several months ago :), I just don't think anyone really thought it was /. newsworthy.....
  • All it takes is a couple of nutzo investors :)
  • (just an expression, ok?)

    Maybe the average /. reader has little need for office-suite applications, but these don't have the generic title "productivity software" for nuttin'. Lots and lots of people spend their entire day in some part of MS Office, and if Linux is ever to have a piece of the desktop market, a competitive office suite will be an absolute requirement for the business case review.

    Maybe you're right, that Linux doesn't need to have the desktop -- but from what I hear on /. a lot of the anti-MS carping is about exactly that, the desktop environment and productivity. For what it's worth, I don't think the Linux suites are quite there when it comes to head-to-head comparisons. Yes, they're quite good for personal users and may well be superior for the uses slashdotters put them to, but Word is perfectly tuned to customer requirements and is the standard (good or bad) by which competitors are judged.

    In short, this issue is not going away any time soon.
  • Yeah, me to Kit =)

    I'm happy for ya to!
  • I'd love to see a /. poll on how many people actually use Office (and how often they use it). I don't think I've used Word once this year; Excel I've used maybe three times (I've never even installed the other apps). If all copies of MS Office were somehow magically removed from the face of the Earth, it wouldn't bother me a bit. I'd probably like to have the disk space back anyway.

    So why does every stinkin' Linux story have to harp on that "But there's no Office apps yet, so Linux is still pretty immature..." theme? Is that the measure of an OS? Whether it has an Office suite or not?! Is this all people care about? (And if it is, what about ApplixWare, Koffice, StarOffice and Wordperfect?)

    Maybe Linux doesn't have a place on the desktop after all. Anyone overly worried about Linux's "lack" of an Office suite shouldn't be using Linux anyway. It just disturbs me when what could have been an otherwise cool article (maybe with something about, say, future architectures or plans for linux.com, or reassureances about LHS) gets bogged down on that Office thing (it takes up 1/3 of the article fer cryin' out loud...).

    -B
  • VA deals in commodity HW and SW. MS has always dealt in proprietary SW, (with some commodity name-brand HW on the side).

  • I need to use Office 97 at work, and it constantly tries to change my style and numbering, it its always wrong

    Now I know that you can turn most of these features off, but the question is why are they there in the first place? I have yet to meet anybody, no matter how computer illiterate, who does anything but bitch loudly about how Word munges their documents.

  • Why do people insist on making random
    targets for linux, in order for it to
    be a success? It already *is* a success!

    For linux to succeed in the enterprise,
    it must withstand faster than light
    velocities.

    For linux to succeed in the home, it must
    create 3d games out of old wood chips and
    prepare pasta like a native Italian.

    For linux to succeed on the corporate desktop,
    it must have its functionality reduced to nil,
    and must must suck just as much as every other alternative.

    You get the point....

  • I think you are really jumping the gun here. There is no danger to linux from this merger, that I can see, only more opportunities. If all the linux specific hardware companies combined they wouldn't match up to compaq or IBM. This will allow VA to be more competative and hopefully allow them to meet large coporate orders like Dell, IBM, Compaq, etc.

    Go VAR, just watching for that IPO now :-)
  • I'd be real interested to hear your line of reasoning, since the number of relevant parallels I can see are, well, zero. I mean they're both companies, in the United States, and they'd both like to make some money. How exactly is VA Research going to take away everybody else's trucks and go home? That's unpossible. : )
  • A business found a profitable niche, and therefore they're like Microsoft? I don't think that stands up to rational scrutiny. It is simply not possible for any company to legally exert the control over the Linux community that Microsoft exerts over the WinTel PC community. Why? GPL.
  • I happen to love StarOffice. I haven't used KOffice yet, but am kind of interested in looking at the spreadsheet. It's going to be nice to be able to add the functions you want to use, rather than having to divide a problem up into 20 steps like with EXCEL.

    I'm damn glad that MSOffice isn't available for Linux. I absolutely hate software that is targeted at people so stupid that it tries to think for me and gets everything wrong. I need to use Office 97 at work, and it constantly tries to change my style and numbering, it its always wrong. After using Word97 at work and school for a couple of years, I'm still looking for the button marked "Quit thinking for me and let me get my work done without your interference."

  • True, but if someone ported VisiCalc to Linux would you get too excited? I mean, it was THE standard for spreadsheets for years....

  • Didn't he just start that company? I was just tuning back in to see how he was doing with and what he was doing, only to find that it was done.

    I'm curious if he really got big bucks for it or if it was just a way for VA Research to get him.

    Either way, Mandrake, if you're out there, good luck in CA and with VA.

  • More competition. More Linux development money. More Linux-optimized hardware. Is good.

    BTW, the little company from Redmond started because IBM allowed someone to own exclusive rights to its PC operating system. VA doesn't own Linux, and never will.
  • I think this could be a good thing, but If I remember correctly, a little software company from Redmond started sorta like VA. I am going to have to wait and see on this one.

    But, More power to Linux is a good thing :)

    RB
  • MS began peddling its wares but became caught up in a movement towards the home PC. It then started to acquire companies to expand. We know the rest of the story.

    VA began peddling its wares but became caught up in a movement towards Linux. It is now starting to acquire companies to expand. The rest of the story is unwritten. I even like the PC's they put out. I am just saying it could go either way.

    I am not saying that they are going to become the next MS. But, to me, there is a somewhat similar start.
  • i agree, and you also bring up a valid point. it seems that everyone keeps b*tching about porting M$ applications over to linux. do you really want people to do that, after all hasnt M$ infected their own OS enough? i also think that this is a terribly good time for someone or some group of programmers to make a really nice program for linux. maybe even charge people like 5 dollars for it. heck if 5 graduate students took up the endeavor they could pay their way through a few more years of skool.
  • Does it really matter if Office gets ported or not? Here's the chance for all those products out there who've been crushed by MS product nepotism to see some action. I mean, I use MS Office at work, but I've found that Wordperfect was actually a lot better proggie at my level of usage. Let's see some other stuff that relies on good quality rather than market share to sell coming onboard.
  • The reasoning is something like this...

    Pointy-haired bosses control computer procurement money.
    Pointy-haired bosses use M$ Office.
    Therefore, computers must have M$ Office.

    Like you, I rarely use Office, but on occasion I am
    required to halt real work and make viewgraphs that the
    aforementioned bosses can understand.

    Also, sometimes my productivity threatens to exceed some
    predetermined limit, so I must "spin down" and I use M$
    Office to do so. It excels at wasting time and effort.
    "WHY DOES IT KEEP INDENTING EVERYTHING!?!?!?!? Well,
    I'll just highlight this word and select... AIEEE! NO!
    BASTARD REDMOND HELLSPAWN, THAT'S NOT SUPPOSED TO BE
    IN A BOLD FONT!!!! AARRRGHHH!!"

  • #"#&% right man! if writing letters the m$-way
    is ones icon, then fuckin' keep off linux!

    ### barx


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