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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.
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.
We still seem to be doing well in Asia - I'm not very involved with our Asian products, but I hear good news pretty often - and we did outsell several Microsoft products (retail sales, not OEM) for ~3 weeks this summer in Japan.
Once software is released under the GPL, there's no turning back. The license agreement cannot be changed.
Bzzzt!
No license agreement can be changed by the license holder (after the product is released) unless the license specifically provides a mechanism for such, and I would debate the legality of such a clause.
On the other hand, I can change the licensing on my GPLed software any time I want. Watch, I'll just nip over to my src directory and replace fubarproject/COPYING with a file that reads "This software has been placed in the public domain. All copyright to it has been reliquished by the author". Hm.... nope, don't like that. I'll change it to "This software is released under the same terms as your mother. Please ask her for details"
The point is that the COPYRIGHT HOLDER can always modify the terms of the licensing for future releases. NO ONE can modify the terms for previous releases (e.g. you can non un-public domain something once you've released it, nor can you un-BSD something, nor un-MIT it, etc). The lincensee may have the right to impose more restricitons (e.g. with the MIT or BSD licenses), but that's a different topic entirely.
Please study up before you post.
Would someone please moderate this thread down. I would like people who see the previous post to see this, but I really don't think either are on-topic for the article.
Thanks.
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."
To be a little more specific - the *only* proprietary part of our Clustering software is a little daemon that runs on the routers/load balancers. You can have as many cluster members as you'd like that aren't running TurboCluster (TurboLinux Server, another distro, even another OS). If I'm not mistaken, we sell a 2-node license and an unlimited node license - many people need only two load balancers, others need more. The admin tools are open-source, the kernel modifications are open-source, etc..
I just wanted to post this before there is some confusion about it - because there always is. We keep a small portion closed simply so that we have *something* that is ours. We do, however, provide the source to an older version of TurboCluster - completely.
Justin Ryan (TurboLinux)