Turbolinux Sells Linux Business

bachoom writes "Today, NIKKEI(Japanese story) announced that Turbolinux Inc. sold worldwide Linux business to SRA, Japanese SI company. Turbolinux has burned through at least $100 million raised across three rounds from a dazzling collection of companies including Intel, IBM, and many Japanese companies. Currently, They were sold by $1 million."

Comments

Re:How do you sell...

[Tomah4wk]

You sell the business - the employees, the sales channels, the contacts. The buying company gets to continue the business with minimum fuss, and can bring the changes they want slowly. When you buy a business your not buying just a product, you get an established company with existing distribution and sales channels, an exisiting product base, and most importantly, an exisiting customer base.

Turbolinux was known for two things...

[emil]

1. Asian language support.
2. High-availability clustering.

I don't know much about their clustering software, but I doubt that it was of the caliber of any commercial offerings of the old-school UNIX players.

From what I understand, Compaq Tru64 UNIX (formerly known as Digital UNIX, formerly known as Digital OSF/1) has the very best clustering capabilities in the industry. The native Tru64 filesystem, AdvFS, can be mounted by multiple UNIX systems at the same time, which eases cluster maintenance considerably. AdvFS is one of the important components of Tru64 that will be migrated to HP-UX (but this work is going very badly, from what I understand).

Supposedly, Oracle is releasing a clustering file system for Linux under the GPL, and it seems similar in capabilities to AdvFS. HP also has ported their MC/ServiceGuard software (the normal high-availability component of HP-UX) to Linux. With this kind of competetion, I can see why Turbolinux is hard-pressed in the clustering software arena.

Clarifications; did SRA spend their $mil well?

[sam_handelman]

I'd like to thank Bachoom (the author of the little blurb) for all his excellent work in writing car manuals and stero instructions (Do not to the measurement! There will be a great occurence!) I say this to all my Japanese friends - use the grammer checker, dude.

Babelfish translation of the story itself (his link) is pretty incomprehensible - don't bother, but let me clarify: SRA bought the entire company, 100% of the stock. SRA will continue to operate in an independent fashion, however, at least for a while (I think).

Does Turbolinux have any debts, or was all the venture capital stock purchases?

We can all agree that TurboLinux inc. was a financial failure of epic proportions (distro was good, I think). The question is - did SRA make a good buy for their $1 million dollars? I don't know much about SRA, but they seem to provide Linux-based consultancy in Japan, where Turbolinux is a very popular distro. If their core consultancy (and training? I can barely read japanese - the corporate babble on the SRA website is utterly incomprehensible) business is viable at all, and TLinux remains popular in Japan, I think this was an excellent buy.