Has TurboLinux Collapsed?

An anonymous reader writes: "UnitedLinux already is short one founding member. Linuxgram reports that TurboLinux has collapsed." The sources mentioned are all anonymous so far; the TurboLinux website is functioning, and offers no indications that the company isn't also.

Comments

A friend of mine worked for Turbolabs

[Twister002]

and he is no longer working there, they've closed the Santa Fe Turbolabs office.

It looks like Turbolabs is closing all their US offices and trying to sell off their products before they close their Asian offices.

Re:A friend of mine worked for Turbolabs

[Twister002]

PS he was told Monday that they were closing, I had lunch with him on Wednesday.

Re:A friend of mine worked for Turbolabs

[GigsVT]

I bet if you posted the color of his tie as another PS, you would get modded up too.

Re:A friend of mine worked for Turbolabs

[Twister002]

He's a Linux guy, he doesn't wear ties!!

Re:A friend of mine worked for Turbolabs

[iuzlinux2]

Well I worked there from May of 2000 thru May 2001. I was @ Interop in Vegas, We all (25+) tayed at THE MIRAGE, my first dinner out that night, we went across the street to this chineese place, drank and ate alot of food. After the dinner, we all put a $1 on the table, and took a bet on the bill, the bets were from $495 UP TO $800... we got the bill, it was over $1200! They paid for it by breaking it up over 2 credit cards... (So accounting would not find out about it...)... 2 weeks later, we all went to ISPCON in DISNEY... Later that year we did a road show with IBM... Boy, those were the days, we all lived good... stayed at the best hotels (sometimes, like in NYC, at $350 a night!).... ate the best foods... But as they say, all good things must come to an end! I made it thru 3 layoffs in the year I was there... I left after the 3rd one occured! I remember walking into the 1/4'ly meetings and saying... We need this, this, this and this... and every 1/4 nothing would change, expect for the VP of SALES... went thru 4 of them... I am sad to see it go... but I am not surprised! I loved working for TL and sometimes wish I could have gone back... But... then again, that was after a few drinks... The company really went downhill after CLIFF AND IRIS were fired... they were the heart an sole of the comapny (have since went on to run a succesful company www.mountainviewdata.com)... In closing.. I wish all my friends who are still there and who had worked there before.. the best of luck! P.S. always remember... Eating on the boat at PIER 39, under water... now that was cool!

only because we slashdooted the website

[maxwells_deamon]

it was fine until we slashdotted the webserver ;-)

Talk about being responsible

[The_Ronin]

Nice to see Slashdot verifying rumors before posting. If they were not hurting before, causing a panic will sure hurt them now.

This isn't "News for Geeks," this is blatant irresponsible journalism.

Nice job guys.

Re:Talk about being responsible

[bje2]

i don't see this as irresponsible journalism on slashdot's part...slashdot just provides its users with whatever news the editors feel is relevant to reprint...if you want to blame anyone for being irresponsible, then blame the folks over at Linux Gram, who actually reported the story...and from what i read in the story, they seem to have multiple (albeit anonymous) sources...so, i'm fine with slashdot posting this...

Re:Talk about being responsible

[halftrack]

This is where you are supposed to READ THE FAQ

Re:Talk about being responsible

[flewp]

Next, people on slashdot will be saying *BSD is dying!

err, oh wait...

Re:Talk about being responsible

[Jonny Ringo]

I didn't see slashdot verfing anything in this post. Besides, if this story/rumor is posted on /. maybe a reader will have more insight as to what's going on and get modded up. That's what's so cool about slashdot.

The other thing is when things go bad in Linux land people unite and support. I would like to see your explanation as to why this story will hurt them more as opposed to helping them (if they are indeed in trouble).

Slashdot: Rumor mill

[dextr0us]

That is a rumor. Untill i hear otherwise from a more notable source, i wouldn't believe it. I dont have a link, but i remember a few years back someone mentioning that redhat would die before releasing redhat 5, in favor of caldera. That was from a semi-reputible site like that link.

Re:Slashdot: Rumor mill

[dsmouse]

Let's not forget AOL's famous takeover bid for RedHat...

Dearth of information

[MAXOMENOS]

Let's see.

• Nothing on F***edCompany
• Nothing on LinuxToday
• Nothing but rumors on NewsForge
• Nothing on the TurboLinux website

Sounds to me like a non-story, or at worst, an indication that their US operation might contract and the company focus might shift to Japan.

Re:Dearth of information

[nathanh]

It's pretty obvious the parent poster knows this. He said "company focus shifts", not "company relocates".

If It's true, too bad!

[jacoplane]

I think the fragmentation of the linux market is a good thing. Anything that stops a single vendor from having a monolopy is a good thing. So i feel united linux was a good thing. Although I personally feel debian will stand the test of time, resisting red hat for supremacy.

Re:If It's true, too bad!

[halftrack]

Trying to stay slightly on-topic I would like to say that debian never will gain a large, mainstream position, debian based distros on the other hand will. They are usually compiled by smaller teams and is getting updated faster. Debian however is too slow.

Now that TurboLinux might be going down, (I'll take this rumour with a jar of salt) the marked won't be notably hurt. There is an abdundance of distros ready to capture TL's market share. Despite what people seem to think there is little difference between distros. User rarly notice the difference between the distros. I my self could not tell a RedHat system from a decent Debian based distro if I didn't see the boot up (and both carried both apt and rpm.)

Re:Going down

[jacoplane]

I've noticed how every story on /. mentioning united linux has been negative. Objective????

This is for real

[Anonymous Coward]

I know somebody who is employed there, and according to them, TurboLinux is going out of biz. They're all waiting for their last paychecks, and apparently employees even had problems with their health insurance not being paid for for the last few weeks.

Re:This is for real

[Kashif Shaikh]

Actually my brother works at Turbo Labs too. He worked on High Availability project for Linux...which he said never really raked in profits for TL(didn't have the 5 nines nor sold hardware with it).

Also many of the projects are being cancelled due to some murky waters at the corporation. My brother recieved his last paycheck--but only half of it. He's still waiting for the other half to come through.

Re:This is for real

[Marsala]

HAH.

Kashif, I'm sincerely sorry to hear about your brother, but he's not the first person at TL who's gotten the shaft for what is basically leadership ineptitude. Hopefully, he'll be one of the last, though.

What strikes me as ironic, though, is that I had a conversation about this back in November of 1999 (and I left the company the next day for this and some other reasons) with the (then) CEO where I warned him about this. My immediate supe warned both him and the board this was going to happen and had his foresight rewarded by being marginalized in the company's decision making structure until he finally got sick of it and left a few months after I did. If I see an article anywhere claiming that the company was blind sided by this or that they blame it all on "market conditions", I won't know whether to laugh or cry.

In the popular street vernacular (at least for 1992 :-), let's kick the ballistics. And keep in mind that the costs of development and number of units shipped are just theoretical here and used only to illustrate a point. I didn't have any access to any hard numbers since TL was most definitely not an "openbook" shop and absolutely loved to keep secrets.

Any rate.

You are a small start up company, and you have three (arguably two) products. The first one is a Linux distribution you sell as a the "desktop" version for $50 a shot. To date, in the US, you can claim about 100,000 sales of this particular product. If you focused on this product and this product only, you'd spend about $400,000 to produce it (salaries+benefits, cost of printing the cds, advertising).

Your second product, you bill as a "server". You charge $700 for this product, which is the same as your desktop product except you strip out stuff like XF86, GNOME, kde, pcmcia support, and other things that don't make sense to have on a server. You set up contracts to bundle third party software (like say a commercial mail system, database, or whatever) as a bundle. Since you're not actually developing a whole lot of new stuff here, you can piggy back most of the costs (salaries+benefits) on to the cost of the first product... so the actual cost to produce is around $200K. And today, you've sold a couple hundred units, so an expectation of shipping 1000 units isn't too far beyond the scope of believability (we're keeping numbers round here to make the math easier).

Since there's a lot of overlap, both of those products can arguably be considered the same thing (but from a sales/revenue standpoint, they're distinct).

And now you have the last product. A load balancing product (clustering is beowulf, folks) that can nominally do the same thing as some of the hardware offerings from companies like Cisco.
Let's be generous and say that you will need another $200K to develop this product (probably an underestimation) by itself. It's not taking into account that you'll still need the distro to be the vehicle for delivering the product, or a full swing ad campaign. Let's say you've had that on the market for 2 months, and you've only sold 5 copies at about $2K a pop.

So, here are the numbers (sorry about the periods, but there doesn't seem to be any good way to set up a table in a comment with slashcode):

Prod___Units Sold__Price___TtlCost__ Ttl Profit
desktop.....100,000........50......(400,00 0)....4, 600,000
server.............1000......700......(20 0,000)... ..500,000
cluster.................5.....2000..... .(200,000). ...(190,000)

Now, suddenly, the dot-com era begins. VCs are throwing money at you like a Div I schools throws hookers at an all-star quarterback. You get a nice chunk of money, and you have to decide where you invest it. Do you:

a) invest more in the desktop/server product by
hiring more developers and try to increase
those sales number by improving your product
and going head to head with other commercial
distros who are doing the same thing?

OR....

b) invest money into building up a sales and
marketing brigade dedicated solely to the
cluster product in the hopes that you some day
will be able to ship 100,000 units of that at
$2K?

If you chose "a", then you're not qualified to be a TL executive. The answer is "b". And not only do we choose "b", but we start giving away our desktop product for free by reducing the price to $40, giving retail stores a $20 rebate on top of the $10 discount we already give them, and then a $10 rebate inside the box for the customer. That way, we can eliminate that troublesome "revenue" crap and turn our only source of real income into a cost center (because it's about $5 to actually make a boxed product).

And, oh yeah... let's piss off the community by trying to close source everything we can lay a claim to that isn't GPL'd (like our cluster product), release a marketing announcement for the most pedestrian of accomplishments, and generally try avoid supporting our customers with stuff like security updates.

I brought up these concerns and said, "I think it's a mistake to focus so many resources on cluster and ignore the base distro". I was told, "I don't see us being a billion dollar company without doing it."

Have you ever been in a conversation with someone and then just suddenly realized that the person you were talking was going to end up drinking the poisoned Kool-Aid and nothing you said or did would ever keep that from happening? It's a fscking eery feeling, let me tell ya.

Any rate.

To John: don't think about it, or you'll just get frustrated. To Cliff: Toldyaso. To Lonn: please stop before this happens again. And to Rok: thanks for dropping my name from the CREDITS file even though 30% of TL 7 uses RPMs with my name in the changelog, dork.

To everyone else involved in the debacle, best of luck to you and I hope things work out for you.

Self-fulfilling prophecy?

[quantaman]

From the sounds of the article TurboLinux wasn't doing so well to begin with. Even if this story turns out to be false it might still cause TurboLinux's stock to nosedive completely killing them off for real :(

Re:Self-fulfilling prophecy?

[MAXOMENOS]

Doubtful. The stock might take a hit, but that in and of itself won't kill TurboLinux.

Of course, this assumes that TurboLinux really isn't closing its doors.

correction, TurboLINUX not TurboLabs

[Twister002]

correction, It looks like TurboLINUX is closing all their US offices. TurboLabs (based in Santa Fe) was a research division. My friend who worked there told me the same info as the article linked to above yesterday at lunch.

TurboLinux Web Site

[e_n_d_o]

the TurboLinux website is functioning

This is a link to the TurboLinux Web site.

Everyone please go and check to make sure it is still functioning.

WTF

[bogie]

"Conventional wisdom has suggested for some time that none of the Linux distributions, perhaps not even Red Hat, will survive long-term and of course all of the successive business failures that have happened among the Linux set call into question the commercial viability of the open source model. "

Umm, what the fuck is she smoking. So I guess Redhat et al should just pack it up?

BTW if that's "conventional wisdom" what is Linuxgram going to do based on a business model that reports on these companies?

Re:A sad day for Linux

[JamesOfTheDesert]

I'm sure M$ will be quick to add TBLs collapese to their revamped Linux FUD page.

Tim Berners-Lee collapsed? Does that mean the Web will be closed?

Rumor has it Microsoft will buy Yahoo

[cpeterso]

Of course, Fucked Company does have a "story" about Microsoft's plans to buy Yahoo. Why isn't that also on the Slashdot front page?

Re:Going down

[Anonvmous Coward]

Objective? This is the site that goes nuts everytime something that places MS in a bad light gets posted. You can't fully enjoy Slashdot unless you meet the following conditions:

- You love *nix and hate MS
- You hate the MPAA, but love sci-fi/fantasy movies
- You want cell phones jammed but don't want free-speech supressed
- You want open source software to be free but are heavily against ad-supported software

There's no objectivity here. Heh.

*Hopes everybody's in good humor when they read this*

I work in the building

[BigMacDaddy]

And the rumor here has been that they are going under and moving out by the end of the month.

Re:I work in the building

[josh crawley]

You wanna bet? We're already outta here... Just this poor schmuts didn't get that memo.

Is TurboLinux public?!

[Eric Green]

As far as I know, TurboLinux *HAS* no stock. Their "stock" tanking isn't going to put them out of business. Running out of cash to pay their creditors, on the other hand... well...

Re:Damn....

[XBL]

Wow, what a fucking troll. Caldera is the most-bashed company/distro, and for very little reason. They have contributed much back to the open-source community, and have tried to follow-through on legit businesses practices that they hope will keep their company afloat.

Their distribution is one of the most stable and coherent of them all. I was sad to see them wanting to do this UnitedLinux crap. They are just trying to survive.

Idiot.

What they'll do...

[sterno]

See, by stating the doom of all of these companies it naturally leads to them suggesting you should click on over to their site to watch the crash. They'll of course report on this in great detail and rake in the ad banner clicks.

Sensationalist statements like that could be overzealous reporting, clever marketing, or both. News organizations learned long ago that people don't tune in to watch the everyday mundane. They want sensationalism, tragedy, and bigger than life stories. Just meeting market demand I guess.

Re:What they'll do...

[bogie]

"Sensationalist statements like that could be overzealous reporting, clever marketing, or both."

Possibly, but I don't recall any sites who are devoted to Microsoft "business" predicting MS's timely demise as a certainty. It simply makes no sense to say "Conventional wisdom has suggested for some time that none of the Linux distributions.....will survive long-term"

Their writer is a represetative for Linuxgram, who by their name alone is stating that their is and will be "linux business to write about".

If I was the editor(who apparently did not proofread this), that writer would be fired.

What is this, fuckedcompany?

[Tom7]

If there's no confirmation, and the slashdot editors don't bother to try to confirm themselves, what the hell is the point of posting this? To "scoop" everyone (even though someone else is already carrying the rumor)? Let's save the rumor mongering for fuckedcompany, and (unless it's something really, really interesting) try to report more developed stories on the news sites.

Re:What is this, fuckedcompany?

[0x0d0a]

I know. Now some *other* website will put up a link saying that *Slashdot* says that it's rumored that TurboLinux is dead, and it spreads from there. Slashdot is a major site, and stories on it have been known to jump to AP sites.

Turbolinux is dying!

[The FooMiester]

Yet another beleagured bombshell hit the slashdot community today when it was revealed that Turbolinux may be dying. Linuxgram sent this weeniegram purporting the apparent demise.

And it doesn't stop there! Linuxgram hits home with the realization that all the commercial distros are facing problems, and that's why they were banding together to form UnitedLinux. But a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Now it shows that TurboLinux may destroy the whole UnitedLinux project!

SuSE will likely survive in the end.

[Nick Driver]

In the end, I think we all know it's going to be Redhat though. A shame as I'm a SuSE guy.

I'm a SuSE user as well. I believe they will still be around after the "survival of the fittest" weeds out the lame distros, not only becausue they have a finely polished distro, but also because they are the darling of, and are supported by Big Blue.

IBM was the winner on Sherwin Williams contract

[AELinuxGuy]

So TuboLinux is picked as the Linux distro for 9,700 cash registers at Sherwin Williams, but who is the big winner...IBM because they win the servicing contract. Like it or not, the future of commercial Linux is in either services (consulting, certification, customization, etc.) or per-seat-license type distros. Fortunately there exists non-commercial Linux distros that do not need to show a profit to stick around. No need to impress the VC; no need to mislead the press to preserve market valuation. If lots of people are using the distro then that is good...if not then that is fine too because the maintainers are still using it. It brings images to mind of the Black Knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail who gets his arms and legs chopped off and still believes he is invincible.

Let me go figure

[eyepeepackets]

Hmm, let's see:

1. The economy is tanking, thanks to some large corporations' fearless leaders and the fact that our national fearless leader is just another one of the corporate fearless leaders who are causing the economy to tank (Oh, the logic, the logic!);

2. TurboLinux tries to make a living selling something which not only do they not own, but is readily available for free from innumerable sources;

3. They have a bunch of highly overpaid PHBs who don't contribute much at all to generating income for the company (How do I know this? All companies have too many PHBs who don't contribute much at all to generating income for the company. Just look at your own company and figure the ratio of income generators vs. non-income generators and then factor in salaries;)

4. Their otherwise free product for which they charge dollars is sub-standard when compared with the other _commercial_ Linuxes with which they compete.

Hmmm, just doesn't add up to a working proposition. You do the math; does it work for you? I don't mean to be mean or to be an asshole or to troll, but sheesh, if the writing on wall were any bigger they'd have to borrow more wall.

Sorry for the employees, but...

[fmaxwell]

I bought TurboLinux and can honestly say it was the worst distro I ever installed. Nothing worked correctly. Tech support was abysmal.

Of course, that's just my experience and maybe someone with a newer distro had better luck.

Re:Damn....

[0x0d0a]

I don't think there's a major Linux distro company out there that hasn't contributed quite a bit to Linux.

Here's a clue for all the Linux naysayers

[Vicegrip]

Last I checked most high-tech businesses were hurting pretty bad. It seems fairly intuitive to me that the current economy will probably cause the weaker for-profit Linux offerings to die off.

If somebody made a list of all the Windows based hi-tech offerings that went bust last year... anyways, nobody would read it because it'd be too long and boring.

Personally, I see Suse and Redhat at the end of this tunnel-- hopefully Mandrake and Connectiva also-- as there'll always be the none-commercial/niche offerings. Also, it doesn't hurt to point out that the free distros existed and thrived well before the commercial ones, just as they do now.

Silly rabbits.

Re:I care

[Ilgaz]

I guess you don't use windows too much... Every Yahoo made app is strictly linked to IE dll's (for html rendering services) and windows media player dll's...

No,also I don't think they will bin Linux version of Yahoo messanger, that would be stupid, especially for DOJ stuff :))

Being an Opera user, I can't describe the discrimination I get from Yahoo. I searched a lot, couldn't find another portal. Let me describe it easily, Yahoo works in HALF for Opera. They even say "unknown browser" on their so-called media wizards lol.

They bought Launch.com, first thing they did was REMOVE Realplayer option (oh no,don't fucking flame me on that, yes I used it since it worked with my browser) AND making it uncompatible with Opera etc.

That story... Believe me, can be 90% chance true!

This was inevitable

[Nailer]

This was inevitable as conflict between Turbolinux (who have recently released a product calleed PowerCockpit) and Caldera (whose former CEO was named Ransom Love) over who has the `sexiest' business threatened the UnitedLinux alliance.

Feeding the trolls

[jmorris42]

I know I shouldn't kick cripples, but here is some free investment advice re: msft.

It is currently trading at $51.11 a share with a PE ratio of 44.8, which is insanely high, indicating downward pressure. That $51.11 price is only $3.61 off of it's 52 week low of $47.50 and it has flopped around in the 50-70 range for the last two years. It started the year in the 70's so it has DROPPED YTD, not risen 18% as you stated. It has fallen from a high of about $120 in late '99 so many longer term investors probably aren't exactly happy and employees with options certainly aren't happy campers. The only good news is that it IS up from where it started on the 5yr chart so in this bear market that is at least something. I certainly know I'd rather have had MSFT instead of the shares of WorldCom I bought in '00. ;)

Re:I care

[dylan_-]

Ymessenger for Linux is cool.

No, ymessenger for Linux is dreadful. It has hardly any options, and is still stuck at version 0.93. Use Everybuddy; it's much better (or Gaim, I suppose, though I haven't tried that).

Re:I care

[dylan_-]

The version I use is 0.99.19-1

Oh! When did they update this? I go from uk.yahoo.com and they still list the version as 0.93

I'll try out the 0.99.19-1 and see if it's improved. If so, I'll just use that.

Re:Going down

[Anonvmous Coward]

I agree with what you're saying, but for different reasons. In order for Linux to be successful as a Windows replacement, they'll need to think down some of the 'choices' you have. I'm not saying remove them, but maybe hide them in another layer so more advanced users can find theM? I dunno.

I installed Redhat and it came with like 6 text editors. As a newb, that was a bad time to hit me up with choices. It's the type of thing I'd like to come to on my own.

I realize this flies up against the way the Linux community feels, but they may discover it's a necessary evil. There are ways to handle it tho. How about labeling one distro as the 'default im a newb Linux user' and labelling the others as more advanced?

*Shrug* I'm not the answer man. Heh.

News on TurboLinux site

[mencik]

If one goes to the TurboLinux website and clicks through to news and events, there is a new entry there for today, 7/19/02. In that entry it talks about a new agreement to provide Linux for IBM mainframes. If they were going under immediately, why would they enter into this agreement?

Re:Nope, MS is

[sigwinch]

As another poster replying to this post stated so nicely, the people being responsible for IT at Sherwin Williams will be pissing their pants.

Why? Unless they were blindingly stupid, they have a contract that allows them to clone the software to their heart's content (possibly paying a modest royalty to TL or TL's creditors), and that gives them access (perhaps via IBM) to the source code, which means they can keep deploying and repairing cash registers without missing a beat.

Even if both they and the project survive this, they will put a big shiny plate over their bed "Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft".

When you're through with that crack pipe, pass it over here. ;-)

Win2K Pro costs around $75, and requires on the order of $50 in extra hardware (big hard drive, extra RAM, faster CPU) to run well. For 9700 cash registers, Windows increases the cost by $1.2M. (I'm ignoring the substantial cost of client access licenses for Microsoft servers.)

$1.2M can pay for a lot of glitches. It can buy 7000 man-hours of top engineering support (at $100/hour), and still be a net savings.

And this analysis ignores the effects of reliability (cash registers crashing == customer alienation and lost sales), and long-term supportability (trying getting Win2K support in 2008).

Turbolinux was dead years ago

[ultrapenguin]

I remember scanning japanese netblocks for insecure linux boxes with , and once and a while I'd come across a abandoned turbolinux box.
Japs liked turbolinux because it came with a jap manual but nobody else around the world was dumb enough to (buy|download) it.