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TurboLinux Gets $50M Capital
An anonymous reader pointed us to a CNet article that talks about Turbo Linux getting $50M in capital from a variety of investors including Dell, Compaq and others. Also talks about Caldera and Linuxcare and the whole Linux Market right now.
Um.. It's already been a story.
What he's refering to is how Rob hasn't released the long-promised Slash 0.4.
BeOS ... give it a year or so and people will ask why they should be using Linux when everything is so much faster on BeOS.
Who knows.
Free software has been championed in the commercial arena, but it hasn't proved itself (again, in the commercial arena) just yet. Let's talk about the viability of a company based on not only being a VAR for but also releasing free software that they created in 2 or 3 years or so when our benchmarks (publically traded Linux companies) have had time to settle down, stop growing, and start making a profit.
A better question would be:
Does TurboLinux think that their proprietary product will be able to adapt to rapidly changing customer demands faster than other free clustering solutions with which they'll be competing?
Personally, I don't see it happening. TurboLinux isn't hurting anyone except for TurboLinux by keeping their source code under lock and key although you'd kind of hope that a company so dependant on free software would at least understand that basic tenets of the free software philisophy and embrace it fully rather than do this "we'll open it up as soon as we think we can't make money off of it anymore" thing.
Only time will tell if closed source is the only way a software company can make money or not.
They integrated "supermount" ??? Dam, thats the ticket !!!!! All other distro's better wake up and smell the roses !! Do they also have integrated detection/installation support for ide zip drives or other ide/scsi removable media yet ??? Since the kernel does spit out info about the devices , this should be possible.
The jump to v6.0 is to get on track with the other distros, right? I recently purchased the boxed 4.0 Workstation, so I assume this is just a change in naming strategy.
I have decided to go straight to the top, Rob Malda. I am waiting to hear back from him. I disagree with your assertions that these stories are yours and that my comments are drivel. My comments are very serious.
Thank you.
Looks like all the non-debian distros are going commercial now - where will it all end ? My money (if I had any) would be on the portals next - sites like
http://www.linuxlinks.com/
http://www.linuxdev.net/
look pretty ripe to me
... Rube
Yet another "computer industry participants are like lemmings" article. Yesterday the trend was windows, today it's linux, who knows what'll be next ?
Free Slash !
Perhaps slightly off-topic, I tried to post this as an article. But I guess here is good enuf.
CNET got it's own linux new center now.
http://linux.cnet.com/
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Could you please post your stuff on a web page somewhere. If you are not a crack smoking loser then posting your stuffon the internet will give you credibility.
They have this high availability distributed web server software. The transactions are spread among many identical computers so that if any one system fails, the others can pick up the slack.
Didn't I see SCO on that list? Now, unless I'm going nuts they produce SCO Unix which is under attack from Linux.
What are SCO up to? What's their little plan?
--
Simon
I truly hope that was flamebait...otherwise, I personally have no idea what you're talking about. If it's:
a.) a personal website
then you're a crack-smoking loser who
can't read (it's a link on the left...
the seventh link down)
but if it's
b.) the constant plea for source code
then it's at (I think)
http://slashdot.org/code.shtml
or you can click on the link that's on the
left side of the page (just between
FAQ and awards.)
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
Being a Mandrake user, I have to say that it's really easy (IMHO I think it's easier than SuSE, which is quite an accomplishment. :^) Mandrake essentially takes an already good product (Red Hat Linux) and beefs it up a bit with improvements like better KDE integration, and adds such things as experimental X servers and kernel modules. The new Mandrake distro (7.0; haven't tried it yet) is supposed to have point-and-click hardware config, and includes such niceties as Supermount pre-configured. Very slick. :^)
:^) It may be time to try SuSE again... :^)
I recently tried TurboLinux...bleck. I use Linux as a desktop OS, and, quite frankly, Mandrake required little setting up to get it working the way I wanted to.
That's interesting, the comment you made about the soundcard. SuSE ships soundcard modules now?? The last time I tried SuSE, they shipped with the shareware OSS drivers, and recommended either a kernel compile (a good idea, IMHO) or to simply buy the OSS driver (at the time, it was just about the only option for my soundcard anyway.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
Okay, I'm wondering...
What does Free Slash refer to? If it's referring to moderation, if you sign up, you can set your own personal moderation to a level where you can read all the comments about Natalie Portman's granite butt you want, or you can set it higher to get rid of the crap. In other words, if you sign up, you have the *freedom* to rid yourself of the crap.
If you're referring to the sourcecode, scroll up to the top of the page, and look at the list of links. The first link is marked "faq", and the second is marked "code." If you can't figure out what that could possibly be, click on it. If you're still bewildered, please reformat your Linux partition and run windows. Or, sell your computer and get an iMac. Better yet, become a Luddite.
If you don't like the policy of having to put a Slashdot logo on a site running Slash, remember that Linux systems use mostly GNU software, or at least software released under the GNU Public License (GPL.) GPLed software is not free.
"Huh?" I hear you say. It's true. Once software is released under the GPL, there's no turning back. The license agreement cannot be changed. If you make changes to the code, those changes must be made available to the general public. In short, you don't have the freedom to close your source if you wish to. The BSD license is, I think, a more sensible alternative.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
...where's my(our) glibc2.1 based distro? I'd really like to try out the recent builds of Mozilla and Opera, but.... ;)
MoNsTeR
Why do you find this necessary, Justin? Is it:
Do you think this is something that other companies relying on open source products will have to do too, or is it something that is specific to clustering products?
TurboLinux isn't hurting anyone except for TurboLinux by keeping their source code under lock and key although you'd kind of hope that a company so dependant on free software would at least understand that basic tenets of the free software philisophy and embrace it fully rather than do this "we'll open it up as soon as we think we can't make money off of it anymore" thing.
Only time will tell if closed source is the only way a software company can make money or not.
Let me play devil's advocate for a minute here (to encourage discussion, not flame!)...
Many companies like open source because they get free (beer) software and source code, not because they like giving it back to the community. Let's hypothesise (and I'm not saying that this is the case) that TurboLinux falls under this banner. Couldn't they adapt their proprietary product to rapidly changing customer demands through combining the best of open source with their own unique (and proprietary) insights?
Of course, they couldn't use GPL code per se, but I think most coders would agree the difficulty is in the design, structure, and ideas, not the code itself.
I want to see Open Source succeed as much as the next Slashdot reader. Help me believe! Saying 'only time will tell' is a cop out--we need to make our best guess now. If software companies can't make money without closed source, that's a lot of missed opportunities for open source development.
Enahs (and anyone else) : We're always trying to improve our products according to user suggestions - could you let us know what you didn't like about it? (preferably in an e-mail to me, rather than a /. post)
I would expect our upcoming v6.0 to be more mature for desktop use (we've tossed the old AfterStep and are using GNOME and KDE as our recommended desktops)
Unfortunately, I didn't catch this when it was fresh, but i thought I would put some useful info out there in case someone was browsing old posts.
First of all, I'd like to say that I'm not 100% informed on our decision not to completely open the source because I haven't been involved in any of the recent discussions. I want to answer your questions because they're good questions and I expected them (I just forgot to come back and check for responses to my posts).
My original post was based on what I knew from meetings we had in June and July. It has been some time, and I'm a bit out of the loop sometimes, being a telecommuter - TurboCluster hasn't really been related to my job lately. I found out that our policy is "to release the daemon source code six months after general availability of each product revision". For instance, we released TurboCluster Server in mid-November, and plan to release the daemon source in mid-May.
Why do you find this necessary, Justin? Is it:
So the capital markets have some 'IP' to include in their valuations?
I'd have to lean towards no, but because I don't really know the details of the final decision (I wasn't present) I'm not going to waste time speculating.
That your kernel mods et al are useless without the closed daemon, so the value of all your code is maintained internally anyway?
This is definitely not the reason. Our kernel mods include ip tunneling and other changes to the networking code - some of which are not useful outside of a cluster, but could be useful with other clustering solutions. Early on in the project, our product was very close to the Linux Virtual Server project, and we contributed a *lot* of code to them, in fact I beleive we did most of the work necessary to get it working with the 2.2 kernel. The version that we eventually released as TurboCluster 4.0 was probably the third version that we created. The code that we have closed is a fairly minimal portion that deals mostly, as I understand it, with the failover capabilities of TCS.
Something else?
Probably
Do you think this is something that other companies relying on open source products will have to do too, or is it something that is specific to clustering products?
I think it is something that doesn't necessarily *have* to be done, but that was probably a good idea in this case. We essentially didn't want anyone to be able to take our product and sell it as our own. They could probably reverse-engineer it and rewrite the code if they wanted, but there isn't much we can do about that. We simply want to be doing *some* innovation in house that gives us a marketable product. This is how I understand it, and why I personally think we decided to go the way we did. We made our decision with the community in mind - but with the goal of making money from the work we did.
I understand why members of the community would be unhappy with our decision, and I understand that it was not the only way to do it - but it is how we did it, and any other way would have surely been imperfect and caused some people to be unhappy with us. We can't please everyone, but we try.
Thanks for your comments - and I apologize for sounding like someone out of the marketing department. I just wanted to be sure to be clear about what I said so it couldn't be taken the wrong way.
Justin Ryan (TurboLinux)
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
What proprietary (I understand non free) software is delivered with TurboLinux?
He's talking about the AC, not Rob, in his post.
"Nobody owns the fucking words man." - James Dean
Some of them (Dell and Compaq come to mind), are tired of being married to MSFT's software base and want an alternative available. Back when OS/2 still had (consumer market) wind, you had companies blindly tossing money at that, too, because it seemed to be a viable x86 alternative. Now that linux is hyped moving more towards the mainstream (not to mention dozens of companies are developing for it and not one Blue(tm) One), the benefits they'll pull are of being able to jumpship if mainstream customers start demanding an alternative to Windows...
"Nobody owns the fucking words man." - James Dean
So, Novell has first invested in RedHat, then (last week) in Caldera and now in TurboLinux.
And if they really release their NDS tools under the NCL, who says Novell isn't becoming a Linux company?
But then, again, with DigitalMe, NDS eDirectory, NDS Corporate Edition and the aquisition of JustOn, they might as well become an internet company.
Or, maybe any Linux company is also an Internet company.
Sigged!
Suse6.3 with YaST2 is probably the most impressive installer and distro combination I have yet to see. I use it all the time when helping friends convert. IIRC Mandrake 7 is also supposed to have a real nice installer too.
Also FYI, Suse6.3 even supported my soundcard (Live! Value) out of box, I didn't even need to compile new drivers. The breadth of hw support is incredible.
If I could only live my life with my threshold at 4...
Well I just thought of how much money the linux-distros have been getting lately. I estimate it to the >> 1 billion dollars. If that money is used to make better scalability, more userfriendly and good hardWare support.
With all that money coming around We (the community) would have the opportunity to make that happen. And if we got the 20 % of the servermarket, and 10 % of the software market nothing could stop us
Shit happens just gotta learn to live with it>/P>
but I'm still waiting for companies to sink more money into hardware support for the linux kernel and better, more intuitive GUI interfaces and installers. If the same level of money and support was poured into making linux a truly viable desktop solution for the computer novice, all of the distributions would be able to gain a stronger foothold in peoples homes and on user's desktops. I see this as a great place to lead off from, but lets ont let the desktop application go by the wayside. On an offtopic note, is there a distribution out there with a truly easy to use installer and a wide variety of 'built in' hardware support? I've been using RH almost exclusively, and, although I could get it running, I doubt I'd be able to say the same about even a mildly less technically able person, let alone a novice.
So what's in this deal for the investors? Do they own a part of the company now, or are they doing it just for the publicity? But then, if there are over a dozen of them, a single company's share of the publicity isn't very big ...
... companies see a new market opening up with the arrival of Linux, and they want to ensure themselves a foothold" - but the investing companies are not the only onw that profit. I just don't understand this from the point of view of the investors ...
The article says "The reason for the investments are simple,
EagerEyes.org: Visualization and Visual Communication
Didn't Caldera just get some money from some of these same companies? I thought I saw SCO on both lists. I wonder what the deal is. The bottom line is that Red Hat, Caldera, TurboLinux, S.u.S.e., Madrakesoft and others are competitors. They are selling packing and support for Linux. Yes, they do cooperate on standardizing the important aspects so that various Linux systems are compatible, but there's a limit to that, and a sale for one is often a missed opportunity for the others.
So I can think of a couple possible reasons to invest is more than one. One is simply hedging bets. If one of them ends up the only real player, you want to own a piece of that company. Another would be a proxy war. Give them all money, keep them all playing and make sure none of them dominates the others. I have trouble believing that that is a viable strategy.
Does anyone have any different ideas?
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
I agree that Linux is not that easy for the end consumer, but Linux has gotten to the point that it makes more sence on the server side of things. This fact only recently struck me as I was configuring some stuff on Solaris and Linux.
Basically it come down to this: the UNIX platforms are getting the new technology sooner than Win32 on the server side. The Apache site states their Win32 offering is not as good as their UNIX offering. This is significant because Apache gets the addons way sooner than IIS. JServ, php, JSP, etc. There are just more new technologies on Linux servers than on Win32 servers. And with Samba, you don't really need WinNT Server (except maybe for Exchange, though I don't know much about what Exchange Server does beyond the email. Does it handle the appointment stuff, etc? Can all the functionality be replaced with zmail and a newserver?).
It for this reason that I think this investment is fairly sound (at least for Dell who has large server revenues, and Compaq who is trying to move [or have they succeeded yet] into the server market).
-no broken link
Companies seem to be putting a good amount of money into linux lately. While I think it's a much better OS than Windows, it's not as easy to learn as windows is. Computer companies hopefully know this and also realize that its going to be difficult to get people to switch to Linux, and even moreso without plenty of support.
Even for a free OS, I'm sure there are plenty of people who, unfortunately, will think that adaptation is more expensive than the exorbirant pricetags on the different flavors of Windows. However, I'm also very pessimistic when it comes to the intelligence of humanity in as a whole, so theres always a possibility that im wrong.
Zack Adgie
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A wise man speaks because he has something to say.
A foolish man speaks because he has to say something.
____________________________
What did the Buddhist say to the hot dog vendor?
"Make me one with everything."