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Stormix Bankruptcy
An Anonymous Coward writes: "So has the news that Stormix has filed for bankruptcy been covered? I was surprised to get a form letter in the mail today from Deloitte & Touche saying they filed for bankruptcy on Jan. 17. And they owe me $20." The Stormix users mailing list has some information, and Newsforge has a summary. I'm typing this on a Stormix system right now, so I hope someone picks it up and maintains the distro.
Could we please have some hard facts? There is no real reporting at the newsforge link. At least not a scan, or a verification of the letter. Hello, when I want unsubstantiated rumours, I'll just read /. It appears newsforge just copied the text from the Storm discussion boards.
Now, I'm not saying that Storm is going into the crapper; I'm just saying that as of yet, all I've seen is two copies of the same letter typed in by some yabo on the internet (I'm sure there is a good chance you are legit, so don't bother flaming. But until I see a scan with the DeLoitte and Touche stationary, I'll keep holding my breath.)
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Stormix did a lot for Debian. They created a *nice* installer, put some good setup and administration tools with it. Wrote the *best* manual I have ever seen come with a Linux distribution, and provided excellent commercial support.
I ran stormix for quite a bit, and it was definatly one of the better distros out there.
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This is what it's all about really - Darwinism and survival of the fittest. If Stormix had totally kicked ass to the point that everyone took notice and lots of began actually using it, it would still be around. Common sense. Some distros are bound to go the way of the toilet while others flourish.
Thank god for what we do have - a plethera (sp?) of distributions left to choose from. Unfortunately the same rule is working against the open source community in the kingdom of the web browser. I personally believe that is our biggest hurdle to overcome, not faltering distros of Linux. Redhat, Debian, Slackware and Mandrake aren't going down anytime soon. AFAIK.
-= jester =-
StormPKG is in Debian unstable right now and works like a charm...I would like to see SAS too, but some parts of Storm are making it over.
It would be nice if some people picked up the other storm parts and became maintainers from them in Debian....are their any other nifty storm software other than stormpkg, SAS and the installer (which I wouldn't think Debian would want as they are working on their own)
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
hmm, I really liked stormix. I have been using SuSE since 4.4.1 and debian always seemed kinda strange to me, but Stormix looked like a good distro with a nice installer and a few config tools. The only thing that stopped me from using Stormix was that their box costs money and I could get SuSE for free from my university's ftp server or through their beta-tester program... I am using progeny now on my vaio and it seems to be a nice replacement for stormix...
I did not mean to imply that Stormix was substandard. Having never run it, I would not know. When I said "second tier", I was referring to its share of the market, third-party support and books, press attention and reviews, etc.
Maybe that's part of the problem: There are so many distros that many are not getting the attention that they deserve. That, in and of itself, may point to the need to thin the herd.
Unless I'm sadly mistaken I believe that phrase has always been the formal leagalize for the process in Canada. We don't file chapter 11, we "seek protection from creditors". Frankly it's at least more descriptive then filing chapter 11, which is simply obscure :)
--
Remove the rocks to send email
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
While Mandrake is pretty pro-kde (not that there's anything wrong with that)the installer and config tools are written in Perl with Gtk bindings.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
However, I have to defend the quality of Stormix, and disagree that it's a 2nd-tier vendor in quality. (In market success is another matter -- guess it sounds like they're having at least some serious trouble right now ... fmaxwell is completely correct in noting that a *combination* of factors is really what matters) Stormix (along with Mandrake) is one of the easiest distros to install, gets X working quickly, has intelligent disk tools, and seems to have an overall *clean* approach -- not as software heavy as SuSE or many others, it's true, but the result is a nice, useable system.
A common view seems to be that Storm's financial failure came in spite of its technical excellence, but I would suggest that it actually came because of it.
Let me explain: Stormix was basically Debian plus a newbie-friendly installation and some GUI configuration front-ends. In my opinion, this was a great idea for a project...but maybe not for a company.
You start with Debian, a system that automagically updates and configures itself, and then you make it accessible a broader range of users with pretty GUI tools.
What you end up with is a very happy user with a very nice system who has absolutely no need to ever purchase an upgrade or support.
To make it worse, Storm lacked a target market and the marketing ability to reach that market. RedHat is the server distribution, Mandrake is the newbie/desktop distribution, SuSE is the lots-of-software distribution, Debian is the Free distribution. What is Stormix?
Storm's existence was a big benefit to the larger Linux community. The consolation for us is that their GPL'ed work can continue...hopefully it will quickly make its way back into Debian. The big losers, I suppose, are the excellent technical people who worked at Storm. They certainly didn't deserve this fate. Their contributions are appreciated; best of luck to them.
Except that new versions of windows aren't distros any more than Slack 4 is a different distro from Slack 7.1. It's all Windows, and it's all Slack. Then again, with M$'s fscked up versioning system, where the number jumps from 3.11 to 95 when it should've been to 4.0, then to 98 when it should still be 4.1 or 4.2 (sorry, kids, but I just can't consider a driver update a new version.) It's hard to tell what's what in the Windows world anymore. . .
Man, Most embaracing typo yet. And in the title too.. Guess I fit right in here..
Anyway, I've proof-read it now, and am reposting:
REPOST:
This is really sad.
While the original Storm Linux was a little rough, and had many installation issues, their newest version (Rain 2.0.6) is absolutely fantastic.
The installer is very slick, and SAS and StormPkg are great tools! I use them all the time. I installed Stormix and immediately upgraded to Woody without a hitch.
My question is why doesn't the Debian community pick up their great stormpkg apt front-end and run with it? All of their stuff was GPL'd. To be honest, I really can't see the difference between what Stormix was and what Progeny is hoping to be.
As for someone else picking it up and maintaining it, I really hope that Debian takes a close work at the work they did. It was great.
Stormix was what got me on to Debian. Since then I've taken the time to get accustomed to it, and I honestly believe that I'll stick with a Debian based distro forever.
This is very sad. They had a very good product. I wish the people well in their future endeavours.
Nice T-shirt!
Ben
END REPOST
Now, a question: I'm thinking that it might be interesting to try to grab their distro and make a new one out of it, similar in concept to Corel's in that it only uses the best of Linux software be default.
Would anyone out there be interested in working with me on it?
I'm thinking Stormix (So Debian) based with the newest versions of the following apps:
- Linux Kernel
- XFree
- KDE
- Gimp
- XMMS
- Some development tools
- Gnometoaster for CDR creation
- Not much else
We could cover all of the bases with only the best available, and add a few custom tools where needed.
Maybe I'm crazy for suggesting this on Slashdot, but it's just an idea. I'm honestly not looking for a flame here... I'm getting to the end of my degree and am looking forward to what I might do afterwards..
Cheers,
Ben
And the people who point to that problems that linux companies are having are missing one very important thing:
Two-thirds of all small businesses fail within the first three years. So it looks to me that we're seeing exactly what we should be.
Shalon Wood
While competition in the marketplace is a good thing, confusion is not. A customer deciding which OS to use has two current choices from Microsoft (Me and 2000). If he is a home user, he gets Me and if he is a business user, he gets 2000 (or so says Microsoft). This same customer is faced with a confusing array of Linux distros, each claiming to be the best. SUSE, RedHat, Mandrake, Corel, Caldera, TurboLinux, Debian, Slackware, and Storm Linux all spring to mind. And there are many more. Unfortunately, these distributions are not all compatible with one another. Someone familiar with Mandrake might struggle with Debian, for instance, and not be able to find utilities and applications that he has come to rely on. Installing a sound card on RedHat is not done in the same was as installing one on Caldera. This type of problem frustrates and confuses end users.
While my sympathies go out to the employees and creditors of Stormix, I think that this is a natural solidifying of a market and is a sign that Linux is becoming a mainstream product.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Now, aren't you glad that Linux isn't Unix? :-)
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
I actually do like the concepts behind Debian, and the fact that it's not as commercial as some of the other releases. Unfortunately, it doesn't measure up to the pure level of usability that other distributions are at. I tried it last week for 2 days and it didn't want to cooperate.
I installed it from a local FTP mirror. The installation went fine and dandy. I would have preferred an ISO image, but I didn't find one on the local FTP mirror. Anyways, that wasn't a major problem and the system was installed within a fairly short time.Everything went fine until I tried to set up the XFree86 system. Then everything seemed to fall over. I have the i810 chipset at work where I was attempting to install the Debian system...the version of XFree86 they had didn't support it. I knew this from dealing with the same problem under Red Hat. But unfortunately, Intel only provides Red Hat specific patches. somehow on their site.
The next step was to change what the Debian folks call the "/etc/apt/sources.list"...so I changed it to unstable and downloaded all of the updated packages, including XFree86 4.0.2 which has support for i810. Unfortauntely half the the deb packages failed to install, so I went into the archives directory manually and installed all of the packages which were showing failed dependencies. That seemed to work and after running apt-get update-dist a few times more, all the packages were sucessfully installed.So I tried the new XFree86 system....but all I got was "Waiting for X11 to accept connections ..............(screen was soon full of dots). Note that this was several hours later. I reinstalled and tried everything again the next day, but I didn't have any luck.
In retrospect, I have had much better luck with Mandrake, Red Hat and SuSE.It goes beyond risk. If you let the creditors suck a dying company dry, then they'll get pennies on the dollar and shut the company down.
If you can convince a judge that you might get your act together, you can get bankrupcy protection. That means that you can help off from the creditors and try to make money, then you work out a system to pay them back.
This is in the lenders best interests (you didn't think the laws were to protect commoners). For example, say I am one of 10 creditors for a company that owes $10m, and has $1m on hand. They might have money coming in (could pay back in two years). Protection helps us all.
Why can't we do this independently? There is a hold-up problem. Say that I am owed $5m, and cut a deal to be paid back. Someone owed $250,000 demands payment, and they'd get paid in full, (while I get nothing). A few of those situations, and the $1m on hand could be sucked out, leaving the company unable to make payroll and going under.
Even if there weren't people that could be paid, we'd have a problem. Imagine a company with 2 creditors for $10m. They owe one of them $8m, and one $2m, and they have $1m on hand. The $8m agrees to hold off payments so the company can try to pay in full. The $2m company now decides to collect, forces the company into bankrupcy and takes the $1m (because the big boy agreed to put off payments). This would be a mess. The lesser debtor could blackmail the big debtor into transferring debt, because all they can get is $800,000 from them both filing, or $0 from not filing, and that isn't right.
The courts protect creditors from each other more than protecting those that lost it all.
It would be a damn shame, maybe some of their GUI tools could be made part of Debian.
The wonder is that Red Hat Linux/SuSE Linux/etc. continue to be usable. The fact that they have bugs is undeniable and unavoidable, given the fact that they are random grab-bags of Open Source software, rather than being an operating system. If you want an operating system, get FreeBSD. Of course, this does not assure bug-free operation either (FreeBSD has had some rather annoying spontaneous reboot problems as of late, that keep coming and going), but you'll probably be more stable.
I, of course, run Red Hat Linux 7.0 on my personal system. That's because I love playing with a bunch of unstable bleeding edge software, I'm a techie, it's my curse. That does not mean I would implement Red Hat 7.0 on a production system though.
-Eric
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
I hope that people don't get the wrong impression about Debian from this. It's really kick-ass; but I'd prefer a little more eye candy. What I'd really like to see is something like a Debian-based Mandrake. That'd be really cool.
It's a damn shame; I used Stormix for a bit, and it showed promise.
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We have fought the AC's, and they have won.
The fact that Storm Linux seems to be going bankrupt is not something that should seem unusual. There is quite a bit of competition in the distro world of Linux for a relitivly small market; RedHat, Slackware, SuSe, Turbo, Debian, and other distros provide stiff competition. The good news is that bankruptcy isn't the end of a company. I'm just hoping that Storm Linux will contiune to put out products. Competition is more often than not good for an industry as it premotes the growth of Linux by providing selection of a product that meets one's needs.
Reviews of the Progeny install have been very good (go to ftp.progeny.com/pub/progeny/ and download the CD image), and this ease-of-use addition will be a real boost to Debian.
I'm sorry to hear about Stormix, but there's been an ex-Storm person at Progeny for a while, and I hope the other good people from Storm get to move over.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
How come a company like Stormix, with a real product can be so unfortunate to have this happen to them, yet fly-by-night LinuxOne can continue to exist?
What a sick notion. You make it sound like the creditors are evil, greedy attackers rather than the people and institutions that trusted Stormix and loaned them money. What would you think if you lent someone money and they went to court to try to keep from repaying you? Would you view the court as a "protector"?
For more information, please see the Stormix-users mailing list. Scroll down a bunch to get to the bankruptcy threads.
You might find this message thread particularly interesting...
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I guess that the obvious thing to say would be, OK if its so easy, have you done it? But a more useful thing to point out is that packaging is one of the harder things to do in Software Development. I work in software testing of enterprise middleware and really a big percentage of bugs come from packaging mistakes and 3rd party compatability and not in coding mistakes. Think about all the issues with compilers, interpreters, virtual machines, orbs, etc. that seem to change daily. And then think about getting ever last little header file and config file in the right place and at the right version. And then for an OS think about hardware support; multiply the number of CPU types, motherboard chipsets, BIOSs, bus types, sound cards, video cards, network cards, protocals, CDRs, Tape Drives, etc, together and you get a huge number of combinations.
Yes I'm sure it's easier to come up with an OS when you start with such a well designed system as Debian espesially because it has the deb/apt package system but I can't see how you whould think that that was a trivial project. And I havn't even gotten to the subject of Support, even if you do throw out your own distribution are you going to support it and fix bugs and solve customers problems with it?
Now, Stormix didn't really have that issue. IMO, the main issue that Stormix had was that you had no option on initial install via the penguin-poo slick GUI to install, say, more advanced programs. You had to find them on the CD afterwards and install them, and there wasn't a large array of programs available via initial install. IMNSHO, they could have simply had the 'extra' programs under a second sub-menu, say, as 'extras', or 'more programs', with a notice that the main programs would not be enough for most people, and then go on to label the 'extra' programs under a category as say, "CD Burning Tools" and install them all in that manner. I'd say that was quite possibly the biggest fallacy of Stormix, as far as usability is concerned.
I was thinking today that, if Stormix realeased, say, Stormix 2001, they would likely base it off Mandrake, but base it off of apt, possibly with their own custom db of packages. (i586, anyone? I certainly notice a huge speed difference with optimized packages.)
If that were to be done - a apt based Mandrake distro with a more sensical installer for beginners (keepin' it technical for us geeks at the same time) I think everyone could be happy. (RedHat wouldn't have much to hold to that - what got them in the lead was their RPM w/ early acceptance of X and such.)
*sigh* Well, I hope Stormix continues to be worked on by someone. If for no other reason, that boot logo was tatz. ;)
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CAIMLAS
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Just my note to all those burgeoning 'linux admins' out there..... especially those who argue over what the 'best' distro is all the time, or what one they will use 'forever' or 'from now on'.
Some facts:
1) There have been several linux distros over the years, and have had a rise and fall (and rise and fall etc...) in popularity. lsl. mcc. slackware. debian. redhat. Suse. + all the spinoffs/oneoffs...
2) There's more to unix on the x86 than Linux... and more platforms than x86.
Now.. really, instead of all these efforts.. why not put some effort into some actual computing instead of arguing about what's a better distro, or tweaking your desktop for the 1000th time? Do a bit of code. Ever installed FreeBSD before? OpenBSD? NetBSD? Go scam a copy of Solaris x86 and learn what it's all about... I'm not saying any are as 'good' as linux at the things you probably expect them to be.. but...
What I'm saying is.. it seems to me a lot of pro-linux people nowadays are getting to be as bad as any other OS-worship crowd.. they paint themselves into a little corner instead of looking at computing in general. You think it's a big linux world.. but it's not.. there is a lot more out there.
The point is, they should learn something outside of just 'linux linux linux'. Use those neurons to expand their horizons.
;)
I mentioned Sol x86 because I doubted a lot of kids in their basements would have a sparc laying around... and sol x86 is basically free ($20).
Oh. And experience with it might really help them if they ever actually have to use solaris/sparc.
I'd go on a tear about the 'parents basement' thing.. but it's not worth it
...you have to be at least as good as Debian, or nobody will notice you until the Slashdot headline says you're gone.
Consider Corel a moment. Can you really take a distribution seriously that installs a network-connected machine without a root password? If they can't even get such a basic security feature right, what else didn't they do right?
The last version of Stormix I looked at wasn't very impressive either.  I really only looked at the installer and this was back in October, however the install was very choppy and unnatural.  I actually believe Debian's potato installer is more friendly.
This is really sad.
While the original Storm Linux was a little rough, and had many installation issues, their newest version (Rain 2.0.6) is absolutely fantastic.
The installer is very slick, and SAS asn StormPkg are great tools! I use them all the time. I installed Stormix and immediately upgraded to Woody without a hitch.
My question is why doesn't the Debian community pick up their great stormpkg apt front-end and run with it? All of their stuff was GPL'd. To be honest, I really can't see the difference between what Stormix was and what Progeny is hoping to be.
As for someone else picking it up and maintaining it, I really hope that Debian takes a close work at the work they did. It was great.
Stormix was what got me on to Debian. Since then I've taken the time to get accustomed to it, and I honestly believe that I'll stick with a Debian based distro forever.
This is very sad. They had a very good product. I wish the people well in their future endeavours.
Nice T-shirt!
Ben
StormLinux is the Mandrake of Debian, it is really a great OS for those who can't understand Debian's complicated installation, or use. It really is a shame. StormLinux2k had the power of potato, and the ease of use of Mandrake. We should seriously take up a fund, send them a check with a note and just say thanks.
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I'm a karma whore, mod me up damn you!
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58.0% slashdot corrupt
Weird thing is that I really wanted to work for them (I live in Vancouver), but never got around to sending a resume...guess it was for the best.
Carousel is a lie!
some of their gui installers and enhancements were very cool.
but it was all kde, and i could not seem to get it properly gnomeified...so i switched to debian.
some of the stuff was broken...but they sure had a great support list.
BTW, I think they are still seeking an infiusion of cash, and are close to breaking even, so I don't think I'd write them off just yet.
Maybe we should slashdot the stores and rescue them? Just kidding.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
Too bad... they had a nice, uh, logo.
Everyone wants to think of the creditors as being a bunch of rich venture capitalists. In many cases, the creditors are small businesses that have extended credit. They are office supply stores, office furniture stores, mom & pop copier sales companies, electricians, and so forth. They are the ones that need protection.
I have seen how bankruptcies are often handled. The financially-troubled company gets the courts to step in and creditors are paid pennies on the dollar -- while the company executives keep earning 6-figure salaries.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
It hasn't been a good idea for a regular machine for four or five years now (since 1.1 came out, iirc).
There is no guarantee, nor even a tendency, for packages in unstable to get along, or stay in synch. They really mean "unstable"
With weekly updates, I found that an unstable machine becomes completely unusable about twice a year, requiring a day or two to get back up.
The solution is to use "testing," which is lagged two weeks from unstable so that the bombs can be removed . . .
I'm not sure what packages Debian comes with, but the typical Mandrake install involves a KDE2-centric set of configuration tools (though other desktop managers are available in the distro), Webmin, Apache's Adv. Extranet Server, Mod_SSL, Mod_PHP (v4.0.4pl1), Perl/Mod_Perl, OpenSSH. :)
Plus there are other niceties in Mandrake, such as a utility for importing your Windows TTF fonts, the menu utility that keeps the app menu across desktop managers consistent, and I guess what would end up renamed as Debdrake Update.
Just some ideas for anyone up to the challenge.
Digital Wokan
I wanted to spend 8 years defending the US constitution.