Mission Critical Linux in Trouble

Dynedain writes: "ZDNet reports that Mission Critical Linux who specialized in server clustering, is laying off 90% of their work force of 60 after failing to secure a buyer of the company. :("

Comments

Re:mission critical Linux?? why??

[pmsr]

Everything is relative. I bet those systems keeping track of your bank account are mission critical to someone. For the shareholders of the bank at least. And they would be for me, if a failure in them prevented me from receiving my salary and i couldnt feed my daughter or pay mortgage. ;)

/Pedro

Insider story.

[ivan256]

Ok, here's the dirt. Basically we had to choose between getting more funding, or selling the company. Two offers came over the table to buy the company and we picked one. It fell through at the last moment and we had to make some tough decisions. Our support services were loosing money, so they're gone. We've kept profitable custom engineering projects and our cluster products groups. Hopefully we have enough funds to stay alive untill our products can support us. We're not planning on going completely out of business in the near future.

Full disclosure: I'm one of the employees that didn't loose their job. Someone else may be less optimistic about the whole thing. Since we were as nice as possible about laying people off (They got to stay around, paid, using their offices to find new jobs for three weeks) you probably won't find too many pissed off ex-employees.

Re:Insider story.

[Anonymous Coward]

As an employee that got laid off, I can honestly say that he's right, not many harbor hard feelings. The management tried thier best to make this as painless as possible on us all, and for the most part succeeded. Many employees have managed to find other jobs elsewhere, myself included, but some are still looking (and should be offered jobs! they're good people!). Best of luck to those who stayed. And for the management team, I'd work for them again any day, they truely tried to make the best of a horribly sh*tty situation.

RIP MCLX.

Re:Yeah, and what's wrong with this picture?

[Captain_Carnage]

Oh, yeah ... buy what's valuable for a song, dump the rest, screw the investors and employees, file Chapter 7...and Angell walks away with a bag full of money and IP while everyone else gets screwed. And I thought Linux was supposed to be different...

Ok, I was one of the employees that got the axe, and I'm telling you it ain't like that. The company was very up-front about all their dealings and did everything in their power to keep the employees from getting screwed. They paid us for a month and maintained our benefits while we basically used their facilities to find new work.

As for Rick Angell, he's taking a gamble. He's paid what I consider more than what the IP is worth for both the IP and the company's debt (which must still be discharged somehow), gambling that MCL's IP will actually become worth something, and he's kept around as many employees as made sense to work on those projects. In the end, it could all still fall flat...

FWIW I've dealt with Rick personally, and he believes in Linux. He also believes in (at least some of) the products MCL was/is developing, and is pumping his own money into the company to keep it alive. That's quite a gamble to take, if your goal is to rape the failed company... And even the rest of the investors weren't interested in screwing over the employees... If they were, they could have declared bankruptcy a month early and split the cash that was paid to employees in salaries and benefits.

Sure, it's easy to be cynical when something like this happens. But management and the investors really did try to do everything they could to keep the company alive... and then for the employees, when it became evident that wasn't an option.