Turbolinux Not Dead Yet

Abdul Nabi writes "I found this article on Linux Today which is a response from Turbolinux to the recent rumors of a shutdown. The responds contends that they are restructuring rather than shutting down." Ya know, I can't think of a single person that I know that runs Turbolinux. Maybe that has something to do with their problems.

Comments

They're getting out of the US business

[blackcat]

Basically, they are shutting down their US dependance to reduce cost. The US market is overcrowded with Redhat, SuSE, Mandrake and Caldera who all try to sell support and services, too. So Turbolinux is going back to their home market where the competition is not that stiff.

We've already seen this with SuSE back in August last year when they layed off 30 of their US staff.

turbo, not so turbo ...

[SuperDuG]

Well the reason that turbo linux came out way back in the day was because it was optimized for higher end machines. Something that RedHat, Caldera, Slack, and Debian hadn't done, yet. The basic demise of Turbo's market hold came out when Mandrake came out. Mandrake took the ease of RedHat and brought the optimizations that RedHat users wanted. Along with a few extra packages that RedHat wouldn't carry (IE: KDE), Mankdrake brought about where linux would be going.

Turbo to this day has an installer that can compete only with slackware and debian, if you noticed neither of those installers are actually what anyone would call "user friendly". But they weren't designed to be user friendly they were designed to install their distribution. Turbo's marketshare is in Asia and Southern America. Europe and the US see RedHat, SuSE, Mandrake and Debian and think that the other distros of the past are dead.

Has anyone here every looked at the list of linux distributions out there today? It's not like there is a perfect distro for everyone. I wouldn't say Turbo was dead, just like I wouldn't say that and OSS project is dead. A dead OSS project is unknown because someone has forgotten about it. If there is at least one person who knows and uses a distro/software then it's not dead.

On a wee bit of a side note, if you want to count how success and whether or not something is alive by monetary values. How much money can one really expect to make on something that is free? I'm not trying to start a Open Source flamefest, but just identifying the original intent of Open Source, freedom. Can you put a price on freedom? I can't.