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Atipa Corporation to Receive $30M Investment
Dave Whitinger, formerly of LinuxToday fame, now from Atipa wrote in to tell us that "Soros Private Equity Partners, TA Associates, and WR
Hambrecht + Co. have invested more than $30 million in Atipa Linux Solutions. " Also, if you haven't seen Dave's Linsight service, you should check it out. I've been wanting to hack something like that together for years, but now I don't have to ;)
Atipa immediately used the $30M to settle a debt with the company that invented the name ``Atipa''.
;)
My mistake.
The box - or most of it, I should say - didn't ship until a month after they charged my credit card. When it did arrive, it had an ATAPI CD-ROM instead of the SCSI I ordered, the SCSI chain was unterminated so it wouldn't have booted at all... and the monitor didn't arrive at all. I had to call them to find out that the monitor - which they had already charged me for - was back-ordered. I told them to drop that part of the order and got a better monitor cheaper from someone else - but still had to spend several months playing phone tag with them before they refunded me.
On the rare occasions I could get someone on the phone who would admit to knowing about my order, I was usually told I had to talk to Jason Talley, the boss - who was never there and who never, ever, ever returned my calls. Even when they admitted shipping the wrong CD-ROM drive was their mistake, they never gave me an RMI for it so I could return the damned thing.
Of course, I was an idiot not to just buy parts and put them together myself. All the same, fuck Atípa.
This article provides an interesting insight into Dave's achievements. --Marius.
I wonder what made them switch? Certainly not all the money to be made in Linux these days, huh? I may well be wrong, but it goes to show what can happen to dedication to a cause when money becomes a factor.
After all, we don't hear about multi-million dollar FreeBSD company IPOs, do we? Have there been any, anyway? I don't really follow the BSD world (but maybe I should given that I use OpenBSD!)
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auntfloyd
Back when I was in college at the University of New Mexico, I remember visiting Atipa when it was in a garage-like building behind a house in a scary part of town. We went there to pick up a PC (back before they were big into Linux...they were FreeBSD zealots at the time) and some cholos across the street were throwing up gang signs at us. It was classic. Somehow, my roommate (the guy buying the peecee) knew one of the Atipa guys from back in Texas and they we're supposed to be kind of crazy. We knock on the door, half expecting some guys with 9mm's to open it and shoot us on site. They invite us into the place and my jaw drops. It was the coolest office I'd ever seen. It was, as I said, a building that once held some sort of garage or warehouse. It was kind of dark inside but they had it lit up with torch lamps, which were pretty new and cool at the time. They had a rack with a fractional T1 or something like that and a couple of FreeBSD boxes. We got our pc and left and I remember thinking that it was the most "garage-ish" operation I'd ever seen.
And now they're getting funded. Times are changing!
Chris