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

$1 million linux?

[lawngnome]

what did someone forget to download it off an ftp site?

What did they spend 100 Million on?

[Rares Marian]

I use $0 to develop software, and $200+ once to be able to burn the cds it goes on?

Maybe the companies selling Linux shouldn't be spending their money building but packaging it.

Re:What did they spend 100 Million on?

[Rares Marian]

Well, then that's why they lost money. They
cannibalized the company. That's the wrong way to do business.
If it weren't for Carly Fiorina's expertise in the Renaissance to recognize an opening in the tech market, I'd say HP-Compaq were dead. HP makes electronics. Compaq makes computers. HP-Compaq makes computers out of the electronics. Stupid, stupid, stupid. It's harder to sell a Mack truck than it is to sell a tire and harder to sell a PC than to sell a pair of speakers or a printer (even a cartridge at that).

Re:What did they spend 100 Million on?

[Rares Marian]

Exactly. Bad business model. In the words of Our Savior, "Why doth thou marvel?"

Re:What did they spend 100 Million on?

[erat]

Didn't you get the memo? Salaries are only allowed for the people who USE Linux. The people who produce Linux distributions are all supposed to do it full time, free of charge, without salaries. Ditto for the tech support they offer.
[sarcasm mode off]

Re:What did they spend 100 Million on?

[Chad Page]

Some of HP's electronics dept got spun off into Agilent, but the calc division got f*cked.

Re:What did they spend 100 Million on?

[Rares Marian]

Wait so you mean she did something like OSDN folding themes.org into freshmeat.net?

I had hopes considering the way she talked about opportunities. Where can I get this info on her evil deeds? /. doesn't seem to be covering those stories.

Re:What did they spend 100 Million on?

[Rares Marian]

Wait so you mean she did something like OSDN folding themes.org into freshmeat.net?

I had hopes considering the way she talked about opportunities. Where can I get this info on her evil deeds? /. doesn't seem to be covering those stories.

Re:What did they spend 100 Million on?

[Chad Page]

Yeah, look at Agilent, they have most of HP's hard-core stuff. Carly did the same to Lucent with Agere.

Check out theinquier.net... Mike Magee posts war stories on occasion. Sometimes the rumors are off but other times dead-on (like the story last week about the 2400/2600+ Athlons, and unfortunatly the Alpha-to-Intel story.)

IMO Mike Capellas ruined Compaq desktops by (a) throwing Alpha to the wind^W^WIntel and (b) doing the whole HP merger in the first place. Oh, and (c) not getting rid of the Presario line, which thinking about it *should* have been sold to HP... ;)

That said Carly hasn't ruined HP's real core profitable biz these days... ink.

I used and liked TurboLinux

[qurob]

I still use it....

Small and fast install....

I guess it's back to RedHat (going to lose the fast install and low footprint)

Re:I used and liked TurboLinux

[Rares Marian]

Just use SRA Linux when it comes out.

Re:I used and liked TurboLinux

[fdisk3hs]

Duh, the poster didn't say it's dead, it just got sold to another company...

I would have thought they were worth more than $1 mill though...

Esp. with them being in bed with IBM so much that they have built different versions of their server distro for different IBM server platforms...

Time to Babel that article...

Re:I used and liked TurboLinux

[koh]

Try Gentoo linux, you won't regret it : http://www.gentoo.org/

Re:I used and liked TurboLinux

[Wee]

I guess it's back to RedHat (going to lose the fast install and low footprint)

You ever bother choosing "Custom Install" in Red Hat? You can get as small a footprint as you want. As for fast install, that's completely useless for me, although your situation may be different. How often do you install? It's about once a year for me and I don't mind taking to the time to look through what's new when I do install. And you even get a kickstart file made automatically for you as a bonus. Makes installing on more than one box very quick.

Using Red Hat will also give you something to bitch about, too, so there's an up side....

-B

Re:I used and liked TurboLinux

[rppp01]

I agree here. I prefer the opportunity to browse through the software and pick and choose what I want. I only wish Windows offered this level of choice. But to be fair, I spend a bit of time when I install MS Office on my systems as well. This allows me to choose what I want (or in the case of the paperclip guy- not want). Install time is not an issue for me here. I'd rather get it right on install, then spend the hours afterwords downloading or installing from CD all those apps that (in linux) I had the option to install during the initial install.

Re:I used and liked TurboLinux

[pboulang]

Just use SRA Linux when it comes out.

You know, I saw SRA and my mind melded NSA and NRA. This of course brings a host of jokes to mind:

The bullet-proof Linux

New gun-toting "hick" Linux with new rot-13 crypto

The linux of a new militia, runs Apache, Camanche, kill || die

sigh, all this flashed through my head.. must stop drinking coffee. . .

Re:I used and liked TurboLinux

[rootslash]

I use slackware... I know how to install software seperately... I'm very special.

Re:I used and liked TurboLinux

[flyingace]

It isnt dead. It might as well be. I used to work for them and have friends there. The packages there there havent been updated AFAIK in a long time. Try something like Mandrake( it rocks! ) with a proactive package update system in place. TL hasnt done security updates in a long time. I hope the geeks from Japan start doing that again..

Sold their linux business?

[Spudley]

Turbolinux Sells Linux Business

So does that mean they only sell turbos now?

Re:Sold their linux business?

[Uruk]

Yeah, and after spending $50 million on that business, it looks like they'll sell for $2 million!

That's a 200% increase in price/investment ratio!

Re:Sold their linux business?

[SEWilco]

Turbolinux announced today a $100 million contest for a new company name...

Re:Sold their linux business?

[imperator_mundi]

2/50 = 4 * 1 /100

so it is a 400% increase ; )

They're just three iteration far from reaking heaven ...

What did they spend 100 Million on?

[qurob]

Marketing, web site, programmers, company logo t-shirts, office supplies, COMPUTERS...

UnitedLinux

[moonboy]

Hmmmm...this should really help UnitedLinux. First Mandrake drops out, now TurboLinux is sold off. What next?

Re:UnitedLinux

[RevAaron]

I doubt that this will really help UnitedLinux, because no one in the states really uses TurboLinux.

Re:UnitedLinux

[reaper20]

I don't think Mandrake dropped out, I think they never intented to join.

Re:UnitedLinux

[jcoy42]

First Mandrake drops out, now TurboLinux is sold off. What next?

Profit!

Re:UnitedLinux

[erat]

As others have mentioned, Mandrake didn't drop out of UL. They never joined in the first place.

As for UL, the selling of Turbo's Linux business shouldn't mean anything. UL isn't TurboLinux; it's the combined effort of multiple different companies to produce a shared Linux base. I don't see any reason TurboLinux couldn't still participate in the UL effort. Just because a company does not sell a Linux distribution engineered in-house doesn't mean they can't participate in UL.

Re:UnitedLinux

[RevAaron]

Yarrrrrrr!

Except people use Mandrake! but not me! NO WAY NO HOW!

Re:UnitedLinux

[the grace of R'hllor]

Question:

Hmmmm...this should really help UnitedLinux. First Mandrake drops out, now TurboLinux is sold off. What next?

Answer:

Next UnitedLinux folds.

There is bound to be a reason why these companies are failing.

sheesh....editors?

[Raleel]

Good morning. Reread that submission. Talk it out. It doesn't have correct grammar.

Re:sheesh....editors?

[jonadab]

> Reread that submission.

How about rewriting it? I normally don't like to complain heavily
about grammar in online forums, since the author may not be writing
his first language, but when the grammar gets bad enough that I
have substantial difficulty deciphering what was meant... Can
someone please explain it to me in plain English? What business
did TurboLinux sell? The whole company, or just a subset?

Re:sheesh....editors?

[jcoy42]

Good morning. Reread that submission. Talk it out. It doesn't have correct grammar.

Speaking as someone who is still waiting for that first cup of coffee, it looks just fine. :)

Come on, it's *slashdot* and it's *early* (at least here). If you want good grammer, I think you're at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Re:sheesh....editors?

[Otter]

Honestly -- this is probably a symptom of having read Slashdot way too much for way too long but it didn't even strike me as particularly off.

It certainly didn't grate on me the way "now owned by Apple and endorced into MacOSX", from the helpfully titled Adam Fedor of GNUstep Says Stuff, did.

Re:sheesh....editors?

[ruzel]

They must have run a Japanese headline through the Babelfish. It's rare you find better Japlish than "Currently, They were sold by $1million."
_________________

LINUX Magizines in Japan

[kryonD]

If I were just to judge off their LINUX Mags over here I would say turbolinux just got hooked up. An average issue weighs in at nearly 180 pages. That's 50% larger than this month's Journal not to mention the extra density of text in the Japanese Language. ...

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.

What was TurboLinux?

[mbourgon]

I remember it mentioned once or twice, but it had about zero mindshare for me.

Here's my thoughts on the different distros. YMWV:
Mandrake - easy to run version of Red Hat
Red Hat - standard distro, supposed to be really cool but I can never get to work right
SuSE - YAST2 is cool
Debian - bitch to install, cake to keep up; apt-get
Slackware - some sort of hard core linux
Turbolinux - *shrug*

What was TurboLinux known for?

Re:What was TurboLinux?

[jimbobborg]

They did two things. Optimized the kernel for the processors out of the box, and clustered web servers. The web server thing was their big seller, as it let you cluster web servers running any OS's, like one Linux, one Solaris, one Windows. Pretty cool technology, but they weren't a big seller here in the US.

Re:What was TurboLinux?

[erat]

Others have mentioned Asian language support and clustering. To that list I'll add this: the first functional (albeit ugly) IA64 Linux distro. As much as other Linux companies would deny it, I'm going to guess that every one of them that has an IA64 implementation has "borrowed" a few things from Turbo's IA64 offering. At least the early versions of the distros had LOTS of RPMs with "[Tt]urbo[Ll]inux" somewhere in the headers (for all I know, many still do).

Wait...

[Rayonic]

So they spent about $100 million in investor money, and now they're being sold for $1 million. In today's economy, doesn't that mean they turned a net profit?

Re:Wait...

[cyber_rigger]

So they spent about $100 million in investor money,
and now they're being sold for $1 million.
In today's economy, doesn't that mean they turned a net profit?

That would depend on how good their accounting firm is.

:^)

New business-model?

[Anonymous Coward]

1: Raise $100 million to sell free stuff.
2: ?
3: Sell for $1 million.
4: Profit!

Hmmm...wait a minute! There is something wrong with the picture here.

Re:New business-model?

[biglig2]

Ha, there's something wrong with your bsiness model when:
1. Do stuff
2. ?
3. Profit!

obviously doesn't work. ;-)

Re:New business-model?

[RuinStorm]

This formla, like many dotcom's is just the "UnderPants Gnomes" Business Model in action!

I'm suprised it took this long

[richj]

I can't really say I'm suprised that they pissed away 100 million in venture capital. Their sales guys seemed to having an adverse reaction to SELLING.

I met with TurboLinux at LinuxWorld 1999 in NYC, this was during the big Linux boon. I was working as an independant consultant, and I had a Fortune 500 client looking to pilot Linux on file and print servers.

The TurboLinux salesguys were flat out fucking rude to me when I told him that I was evaluating different distros to present in my solution. "Oh that's great, just download it and go and install it, what's the big deal?" or some shit he said to me. Idiot had absolutely no idea how business works, if I brought him into my client we both would have been out the door.

Anyway, I wound up running with RedHat (a distro that my client paid for on all systems). I'm not saying that my client expected World Series tickets for a few grand in licensing, but when you have people like that working the booth at a tradeshow it's not the type of people you'd bring into a large and established New York City company.

Re:I'm suprised it took this long

[fdisk3hs]

He wanted the booth guy to blow in his nappy ear because of his big 'client'. Toot your own horn cheese head.

Re:I'm suprised it took this long

[richj]

Looks like you had no idea how Linux works. Just download it and go and install it, what IS the big deal? Did you need your hand held?

This works around the apartment or on a friend's PC. But, for a second do you actually think that someone in charge of a network infrastructure is going to gamble his reputation on a consultant with a few burned CDs and no support?

What if the pilot was a disaster and he had nobody to call? The client would have been back to the "Windows 2000 Migration Plan" quicker than it would have taken you to feel the foot across your ass as you hit the street.

Your mentality is why companies are afraid to migrate to an Open Source system, you have no concept of assurance.

Re:I'm suprised it took this long

[richj]

I think what he was trying to say was that you're one of the typical cheesheads that say "oh i have this big client that wants to do this, give me free stuff".

You're killing me with this. Yeah, TurboLinux gives out all kinds of free stuff, I told the clowns at TurboLinux that if I didn't get a stuffed Tux beanbag for my desk that I was going to take my business elsewhere.

I'm not sure if you got the crux of my argument, but I was looking to have them talk with the company I was working for so they could decide what distro they were most comfortable with. All I wanted was a conference call, if they could have given me an actual salesguy to do a sales call I would have been absolutely thrilled.

Its independent consultants like you that give everyone else a bad name.

I left a full-time job at the client for a security engineering position at a telco. I wanted to finish the project I was on and not strand the company I left, because:

1. They were thinking about Linux as a file/print server
2. They were going to go with W2K if Linux didn't work
3. I was the biggest Linux advocate in the IT dept and I had the best chance of convincing the political "powers" that Linux was the best choice.

It was a great way to get Linux in the door at a big company and make a few dollars on the side. But I'm far from an independant contractor.

What it all boils down to is I spoke with TurboLinux and asked if they wanted to be part of the pilot, and the sales guy told me to "just download it and install it".

What's your tactic for getting Linux in the door, just going out and reinstalling everything?

Re:I'm suprised it took this long

[llywrch]

> This works around the apartment or on a friend's PC. But, for a second do you actually think that someone in charge of
> a network infrastructure is going to gamble his reputation on a consultant with a few burned CDs and no support?
>
> What if the pilot was a disaster and he had nobody to call? The client would have been back to the "Windows 2000
> Migration Plan" quicker than it would have taken you to feel the foot across your ass as you hit the street.

Following this entire thread, richj's comments describe a situation where he walked up to some salesdroids, handed them a hot lead that would make the day ofany salesdroid from MS or Oracle, & they told him to FOAD.

Granted, I don't know if richj was dressed in a suit & tie, or forgot to bathe that week & wore tattered jeans & a ``Fuck Gates" t-shirt. But I doubt it was the latter.

If a company can't go thru the trouble of putting on a dog-&-pony show for a client, tell them the usual stories about how their product is a dessert topping & a floor wax, will eat their dog if they want it eaten, they deserve to go out of business.

Geoff

Re:I'm suprised it took this long

[tmark]

If a company can't go thru the trouble of putting on a dog-&-pony show for a client, tell them the usual stories about how ...[they] will eat their dog if they want it eaten, they deserve to go out of business.

Dude, maybe the TurboLinux guys won't eat the customer's dog, but TurboLinux is a Japanese distro. If the customer wants its dog eaten, they have to go to a Korean distro. The most TurboLinux will do is eat used ladies undies from one of those (in)famous Japanese vending machines.

Re:I'm suprised it took this long

[richj]

You seem to have Big City Syndrome - anyone who lives or has lived in a big city, but was born in a small town, will mention the big city in which they live/lived at least once in every conversation.

So, which hick burg do you hail from?

Hmm, well I either lived in NYC, or less than 5 miles from it my whole life. With the exception of 4 years in the USMC, that is. If that makes me a hick....

You normally this xenophobic?

obligatory

[kin_korn_karn]

TL1: What happen?
TL2: Somebody set up us the merger.
TL3: We get signal
SRA: How are you gentlemen?
SRA: All your rinux are belong to us
TL1: what you say !!

Re:obligatory

[Ilgaz]

For once, ROTFL especially for rinux part! :)

Anyone doesn't know where that "rinux" comes, check http://www.engrish.com ;-)

Re:obligatory

[kin_korn_karn]

thank you. since we know that hoping

at any rate, I made a bunch of people waste their mod points on a useless post.

Re:obligatory

[emmons]

Don't forget that his moderation of that post was taken away when he posted to the story himself. Idiot.

Not surprising

[Launch]

I mean they were sold by $1 million... I wonder what the other $99 million are doing... prolly looking for new jobs ever since that dick head $1 million sold them all.

So Long TurboLinux

[christurkel]

So Long TurboLinux, and thanks for all the sushi!

Masters of comedy presents

[stud9920]

TL1: What happen?
TL2: Somebody set up us the merger.
TL3: We get signal
SRA: How are you gentlemen?
SRA: All your rinux are belong to us
TL1: what you say !!

You are a true comedy genius ! What do you think of this one ?

step 1: put $ 100m into software distributed for free
step 2:?????????
setp 3: PROFIT !!!!

I can't believe you and I are so funny...

Re:Masters of comedy presents

[kin_korn_karn]

Ever seen Ishtar? I think we've got a winning road act here.

we're off on the road to Sheboygan
we'll dine on the sand which is there

TurboLinux execs figured it out!!

[Havokmon]

Step 1: Create Linux Distro

Step 2: ????

Step 3: Profit

Title

[yatest5]

1. Start Company

2. Spent $100 million

3. Profit?

Re:Title

[yatest5]

I hope you all apreciate the irony inherent in this post.

Me too - since you didn't appreciate the irony in mine.

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.

Re:Turbolinux was known for two things...

[uncleFester]

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).

I'm not suprised; AdvFS had to have a lot of hooks deep into Tru64 that probably don't (or really can't) translate over to HPUX. AdvFS is cool: I didn't get to spend a lot of time with it but loved how solid the filesystem (and the OS) performed, whether on RAID, JBOD or otherwise. Particularly, I liked AdvFS method of file domains, adding another level to partitioning. It was REAL simple to create quickie test filedomains for small storage areas without having to format/partition/whatnot.

Comparatively, 64-but HPUX is still quite infantile compared to OSF/Tru64. I think HP is making some mistakes in ASSuming they can incorporate some technologies so easily (TruCluster, AdvFS) while throwing away the rest of such a solid OS.

But that's just my unemployed $0.02...

Re:Turbolinux was known for two things...

[__aasmho4525]

just wanted to point out that one of the other things that turbo was well known for is their prowess on linux for 390 / z-series.

cheers.

Peter

Re:Turbolinux was known for two things...

[crawling_chaos]

I think HP is making some mistakes in ASSuming they can incorporate some technologies so easily (TruCluster, AdvFS) while throwing away the rest of such a solid OS.

One of the many reasons I have started to refer to HomPaq as "Unisys - The Next Generation." I figure that they'll be down to a contract service firm within the next ten years or so.

Re:Turbolinux was known for two things...

[Znork]

Actually, my experience of Tru64's TruCluster is that it violates the good old engineering principle of Keep It Simple, Stupid. And it shows. In a failure situation it hasnt been rare that the entire cluster locks up, rather than one machine crashing and the rest taking over the load.

Compared to the incredibly simplistic solution with MC/ServiceGuard, the differences in total uptime shows. ServiceGuard doesnt have near the features that TruCluster does, but it does (eventually) get the applications up and running again on another node.

Which is sortof the point of HA solutions.

Clustering filesystems are not stable yet. They may be in a few years, but for now, ignore them unless you like working weekends. I can think of very very few problems they solve well enough to be worth the screaming mindsearing _pain_ they cause. Stick with the mindbogglingly annoying solution of using NFS instead, if you have to have multiple mounts of a filesystem.

Where did the $1mill figure come from?

[fdisk3hs]

It is not in the story. Do you mean it was sold for $1mill or what? Scooped the story quick, but I'm skeptical of that figure.

LR

What this means

[JonKatzIsAnIdiot]

Yet another story of a Linux company in trouble or quitting altogether. Looks like the Linux revolution is taking a bit longer than originally expected ...

Re:What was TurboLinux? (whereis Gentoo?)

[uncleFester]

Google is your friend... Look at DistroWatch. I thoguht Turbo initially was a distro that would try to tailor to your arch a little better, thus perform better.. but I think they turned into another standard GUI-based Mandrake/Redhat pretty install.

You forgot Gentoo - Even more hard core than Slackware; use if you are into watching your machine stroke out in a compile-fest. emerge is your friend. It's neat to watch my spare box (Celery466) sit off to the side mired in building KDE from scratch. :)

Lets get over the Mandrake thing, please?

[Vanders]

Why is it that people must label Mandrake as some sort of "Linux for idiots" distribution? So its easy to use, so what, thats bad somehow? What, I have to installing & configure everything by hand to be a "proper" Linux user?

Look, get over it. I've been using Linux since Redhat 5.1 (Whats that, 5 years?). I've written my own dialup scripts, I've configured Xf96config by hand, I've upgraded, installed, built, re-built and hacked on Linux until my eyes bled. So please, don't try and tell me I don't know how to use Linux.

You know what, though? After doing all of that, I became sick and tired of it. All I want to do is get my work done, deal with my email and use the web 95% of the time. So I use Mandrake, which at least lets me do most of it without anoying me.

Oh, not that Mandrake is anything like perfect. Far from it, in fact. Its just the least sucky of the bunch, for me.

Re:Lets get over the Mandrake thing, please?

[john82]

Ding! I wish more people would take note of that easy to use thing. It's one of the things that keep more users from leaving Microsoft.

Well said.

Re:Lets get over the Mandrake thing, please?

[blochsound]

I agree, I used mandrake as my first install, and the fact is, if it hadn't been easy to install, I probably would have given up. I think that it is important to know how to change what you want, but if you can't get a newbie to use something because of the perceived difficulty, we won't have any adoptees of Linux, regardless of the distrobution. I am now using Red Hat 7.3 which is working, but it took a while to actually get it running. I don't think that joe q public is going to want to sit down and edit the configuration file for X. Why, because he doesn't expect that to be a condition of computing. the average user expects it to be easy and painless and fairly useful. Otherwise, he would be an IT professional, or a developer, or a Computer Science student. Mandrake and any distro that makes it easier for new people to get set up on linux is ok in my book.

Re:Lets get over the Mandrake thing, please?

[ericman31]

Joe User wants to be able to treat his computer like a TV. Turn it on, send an email, browse the web for naked girls, turn it off. The reason Joe User distrusts Microsoft these days is that MS has been promising that for years, and they haven't delivered it. Instead their prices keep going up, they get taken to court as a monopoly, and their operating systems and software still leave quite a bit to be desired. Now open source has its chance. But if the hardcore "compile or die" guys impose their view of computing on it, open source will fail fairly quickly and the proprietary software world will lock in Joe User forever.

Re:Lets get over the Mandrake thing, please?

[k8to]

Why is it that people must label Mandrake as some sort of "Linux for idiots" distribution?

Because it is.

Mandrake upon a default install does not provide a valid UNIX installation. Huge sections of the POSIX shell environment are missing.

Mandrake tends to build their own tools the nice unix way, with a backend engine, and a frontend GUI. However, they forget to document the backend in any sort of reasonable way, and generally assume all users will only ever want to use the GUI. Example in the 8.0 days was the upgrading tool, which talked to a backend, which talked to urpmi. There was no documentation on this backend tool in any part of the distribution, on any part of their web site, or on any developer pages I could find. When the backend was crashing for me, I had to use gdb and strace to simply FIND OUT WHAT IT WAS DOING. I then decided it might be falling down over strange return values from urpmi, and wiped out the relevant part of urpmi's database in order to get the whole thing working again. Note the top level error of the gui tool exposed to the user was: An error has occurred.

Mandrake follows the Red Hat practice of delivering alpha and beta quality software releases out of CVS trees but lacks Red Hat's technical excellence to reduce the fatal flaws. Mandrake followed Red Hat's lead with gcc "2.96" but provided a compiler which produced segfaulting executables with the most trivial code, such as a C program which simply allocated memory in a while(1) loop.

Similarly, when Red Hat included the not-yet-beta vim 6.0 with all the features turned off to make it safe (why use the new vim when you have to disable all the new features?), Mandrake pulled in vim 6.0 but left many features on, leading to the editor croaking on me at very inconvenient times.

Mandrake has _terrible_ documentation. Prior to mandrake 8.1 there were no published software flaws at all! The bug database is very sparsely populated. The manual is fluff and the online support generally focuses on trivial basics with a real lack of information on mandrake-specific tools in detail. If you write a tool for your own distribution, you need to document it. This is worse than the KDE team and KWin here.

When attempting to test the compatability of different linux distributions across a range of supplied hardware (I was working for a vendor at the time) Mandrake was unable to handle more than 1.5 GB of ram without crashing and burning. The install didn't even suggest there might be an issue, it would just fall over now and then. After spending an hour or so finding their bug database, I logged the problem, and a day or two later it was followed up with a suggestion to try the 'enterprise' kernel. That sounds great. Where is the 'enterprise' kernel? It was in no docs, in no install selection, and I couldn't find a file containing the string 'enterprise' on the CD images. Requests for further information turned up silence.

The Mandrake development team is exceedingly haphazard. They make tools where ones already exist (see package maintenance above, why not use connectiva's apt?) and have fail to understand their role in software very well. On problems specific to mandrake but even more so on 'personal' side projects run by Mandrake employees (eg. Frozen Bubble) I've received the worst kind of developer bad attitude. Examples include:

• Refusal to believe a bug happened when all necessary information to reproduce the bug is included with the bug report.
  "Cannot reproduce" I can accept, but not "I refuse to believe that happened. end of discussion"
• Declaration that because a bug does not manifest on the developer system, it does not exist.
• Insane statements that because the developer is a free software author and spends his/her time to make software for me, I should have no expectations that they look at my bug reports. Hello, I am a free software author spending my time to help make your software better, and have an expectation that they either maintain or abdicate maintenance of their software, not make strange moralistic claims about bug reports being wastes of their time.

Mandrake has come out and publically declared that there is no need for them to support Linux compatability efforst because they are already compatable (with Red Hat). Nevermind that they (as above) do a poor job of chasing Red Hat, the LSB fundamentally extends the benefits of the Linux/Free Software world by providing clarity as a software creator as to whether a binary problem lies in the application or operating system domain. Thus, it provides additional rights to the users of the system, and an ability to clearly identify and fix bugs in the vendor's provided distribution. How can you not see the benefit here?

In short, Mandrake does indeed have a pretty gui, so if that's all you care about, you could choose Mandrake, or SuSE really, or just install Ximian Gnome on whatever. But if you care about stability, or the documentation and solvability of your system, or UNIX compatability, or Linux compatability, or quality of supplied software, or software freedom.. then there's really no good reason to use Mandrake.

Re:Lets get over the Mandrake thing, please?

[Vanders]

All of the flaws you highlight (Real or imagined) are an issue with the Mandrake build and test process, and are nothing to do with Mandrake being an easy to use distribution.

I certainly understand your frustrations, though. You are clearly far more comfortable with a different distribution, and fair enough, whatever makes you happy. However, that does not make me an idiot, or a clueless user, simply because I choose to use Mandrake.

I use Mandrake because it is trivial to install, supports my hardware well, and it uses KDE (Which I prefer) but does not also insist in installing Gnome (As Redhat does), which I don't want.

If I do a Custom install, I can choose to install just the servers I want (I want to run sshd, but not sendmail, wuftpd, telnetd etc. etc.) Mandrake allows me to do all of this, without being too fiddly or complicated in the process.

Just a couple more points, though:

Huge sections of the POSIX shell environment are missing.

Which sections? I have not noticed any differences between Mandrake 8.0 and Redhat. I have not seen any missing tools. Also, which POSIX standard are you refering too? My copy of POSIX Programmers Guide only shows P1003.2 (Definition of a standard command shell language) as "in progress". Admitedly, the list was compiled in 1993, but I'm not aware of any official POSIX standard that defines the shell?

a compiler which produced segfaulting executables with the most trivial code, such as a C program which simply allocated memory in a while(1) loop.

I'm not aware of these issues with gcc-2.96 (The version I have here, in Mandrake 8.0). I've tried a simple application, as you outline* and I see no segfault. Naturally, leaving a malloc(); inside of a while(1) loop will eventually cause undesirable behaviour, but you can't blame the compiler for that.

As for documentation, I have the man pages & google. Not to mention, I've done most of it plenty of times before :)

* The example:

[foo@bar foo]$ cat test.c
#include <malloc.h>

int main(void);

int main(void)
{
while(1){
(void*)malloc(1);
}
}

[foo@bar foo]$ gcc --version
2.96
[foo@bar foo]$ gcc test.c -o test
[foo@bar foo]$ ./test

[foo@bar foo]$

Re:Lets get over the Mandrake thing, please?

[EverDense]

I am not sure Joe User knows who Microsoft are, other than: "that's that Bill Gates guy. He's, like really rich, isn't he?"

Re:Lets get over the Mandrake thing, please?

[HiThere]

Thing is, it doesn't all need to be one flavor. I, personally, dither over Mandrake. I like many parts of it, others I don't.

If I recommend a distribution to someone, it will be whatever I have installed. That way, I'll have a chance of being able to figure things out when they ask me over the phone what the problem is. If a tyro was asking which distribution to get, I'd probably say Macintosh, unless I wanted to support them.

But if someone asked me what Linux distribution to get ... I'd go with Mandrake. I'd probably say, order it already installed from WalMart, too. (Well, depends on what they needed. I might say Pogo, or some other preinstaller.)

Only if they wanted to install it themselves would I suggest that they install Mandrake. Not that it's particularly hard, but I've known users to have problems that I couldn't imagine. I just got back from a help desk call where a used complained that the printing was coming out landscape instead of portrait. Turns out she was manually feeding the paper, and feeding it in sideways.

Re:Lets get over the Mandrake thing, please?

[Arandir]

Because it is.

I never used Mandrake long enough to get to this level of frustration. I left Mandrake a long time before that could happen. I suggest you do the same.

But I do agree somewhat with your basic premise. Mandrake seems to operate under the premise that "easy to use" means "no intermediate or advanced users allowed". Oh, advanced Mandrake users are fine, but if you have any knowledge of Unix, Posix or other distros, you're left outside in the cold.

Re:Lets get over the Mandrake thing, please?

[Arandir]

But if the hardcore "compile or die" guys impose their view of computing on it, open source will fail fairly quickly

Who said anything about imposing our choice on you? We don't feel the need for a single unified free unix-like operating system. We don't think that only one distribution should come out on top. When we hear Linus say "world domination" we recognize that it is humor and not a goal.

I am perfectly happy with you using Mandrake just as long as you let me use Gentoo and FreeBSD.

Re:Lets get over the Mandrake thing, please?

[ericman31]

I personally don't use Mandrake, I prefer RedHat over all. This post actually wasn't in support of Mandrake but more trying to discuss what Joe User wants. Joe User doesn't give a flip what his PC runs. He does want it to work easy, like any other appliance. He will trust brand names, like he does with any other appliance. This is one area where Microsoft had an advantage. Right now there is a window of opportunity because Microsoft's brand name is working against them. My father, who has been a died in the wool supporter of MS products for years now is talking about Linux and MacOS and seriously considering them as an alternative to MS, as an example. He is a long time PC user, not an IT guy.

Re:Lets get over the Mandrake thing, please?

[k8to]

All of the flaws you highlight (Real or imagined) are an issue with the Mandrake build and test process, and are nothing to do with Mandrake being an easy to use distribution.

I didn't suggest it was hard to use. I suggested it was built with a foolish lack of concern for a great many things that matter besides ease of use. Additionally, these errors end up costing in the realm of fixing/maintaining, which some people might feel is more important to 'ease of use' than the first impressions.

However, that does not make me an idiot, or a clueless user, simply because I choose to use Mandrake.

It doesn't make you an idiot, but it does mean that the distrubution is _designed_ for the lowest common denominator. If I want to be uncharatible, idiots. This mindset of "I just want it to be easy and I don't care if it's poorly designed and unfixable" makes me wonder why Mandrake users don't go use Windows XP. It works decently you know.

Much chatter about install selections elided. Any distribution which doesn't make this simple is broken.

Huge sections of the POSIX shell environment are missing.

Which sections? I have not noticed any differences between Mandrake 8.0 and Redhat. I have not seen any missing tools. Also, which POSIX standard are you refering too? My copy of POSIX Programmers Guide only shows P1003.2 (Definition of a standard command shell language) as "in progress". Admitedly, the list was compiled in 1993, but I'm not aware of any official POSIX standard that defines the shell?

Please review POSIX 1003.2. Mandrake leaves out many of the required shell utilities by default. As a result, posix compliant shell scripts will not run on Mandrake. I don't remember the exact list. I seem to remember that shutils was simply not available. Yes. Really. NO SHUTILS.

a compiler which produced segfaulting executables with the most trivial code, such as a C program which simply allocated memory in a while(1) loop.

I'm not aware of these issues with gcc-2.96 (The version I have here, in Mandrake 8.0). I've tried a simple application, as you outline* and I see no segfault. Naturally, leaving a malloc(); inside of a while(1) loop will eventually cause undesirable behaviour, but you can't blame the compiler for that.

In the context in question, I wanted to ensure that I could allocate all the memory on the machine without it falling over. This was a controlled stress test to push the VM, ensure proper memory detection, and the memory/disk subsystems. These were real points of failure at the time (2.2.17 and so on).

I had other programs which nicelay allocated and deallocated memory willy nilly with walking ones and zeros patterns while this program would simply allocate memory until it was given an error or until it was killed by the OOM killer. It wasn't guilty of causing overcommits at all. It dutifully touched each page as it was allocated, so no problem there.

I had various problems with the various tests, but finally was able to get the allocator to die in some cases on its own, which was allocating memory in 4096 byte chunks. This was shocking to me. Copying over the red-hat compiled binary of the same error produced no errors at all.

Please note, additionally, that there is no gcc 2.96. It is a fiction. Red Hat lifted a pre-release of 2.96 from the gcc cvs tree and called it gcc 2.96. The GCC developers had no intention of anyone considering this an actual version or release, it was just the version they would have used had they finished with the release. Because of this problem, 2.96 was marked as a banned never-release version of gcc which would not see the light of day to avoid confusion with the Red Hat release.

Thus, there was no gcc-2.96, but merely a CVS snapshot with a TON of important patches. It would be more appropriate to call it gcc-2.9redhat. Mandrake's version, with less expertise was far more flawed and problemed. For all I know they released repatched versions later, but simply that they distribute 2.96 shows they are either passing along Red Hat's questionable decision or continuing to be even more misleading to their users by producing a second build of gcc which also is not gcc 2.96, but is not the same build as Red Hat's.

As for documentation, I have the man pages & google. Not to mention, I've done most of it plenty of times before :)

Man pages and Google are great. Info pages are even better (if you hate them, learn to use pinfo or the KDE info viewer, or something.

But if a distribution vendor provides a piece of software specific to their own distribution, the onus is on THEM to document it, in a man page, in an info page, in a textfile, somewhere. Mandrake has failed to provide one drop of documentation for some of their programs. The mentality is: this is a program which sits behind a gui program, no one needs to know anything about it. This way leads to madness.

Mind you, I didn't even get into the cheap shots, like the corrupting fonts in 7.2 and the blind slipstream rpm 4.x release and etc. etc. etc.

Mandrake does not comprehend the UNIX way. Those who do not understand the mistakes of the past are busy repeating them and all that.

Re:Lets get over the Mandrake thing, please?

[k8to]

Oh, and how did your program exit?

Re:Lets get over the Mandrake thing, please?

[k8to]

Guy, I'm not some longtime bitter and frustrated user of Mandrake.

I used Mandrake for work for about 3 weeks in order to validate it on a line of hardware. I was pretty shocked that it was that bad.

94-97 Slackware. 97-2002 SuSE. 2002 Debian.

Re:Lets get over the Mandrake thing, please?

[io333]

Excuse me? How about making the subject "Let's get over Mandrake being easy to use"

You've been using linux for 5 years? I've been using *nix for 20. Mandrake is EASY TO CLEAN INSTALL, and that is it. After that it is a bloated pig of a distribution with horrible dependency issues and an alpha version software installer. In contrast, Gentoo is a pretty large PITA to install, but so much faster than Mandrake when it is done that it is rediculous, and has the easiest new software installation procedure of *any* linux distro out there, with near ZERO dependency issues.

Re:Lets get over the Mandrake thing, please?

[blochsound]

I agree. I think that there is a big window for a major coup by the open source community. I am not against the hardcore coder guys, hell, we wouldn't even have linux without them, but I still think that accessability is a key issue. I like that fact that my distro has been tweaked by me, ableit not too much, I like that fact that I have access to all this GREAT configurability. It just needs to presented in an accessible manner, and that is where my hope lies. If I can learn how to use gnu/linux, anyone can....

Re:Lets get over the Mandrake thing, please?

[Vanders]

Ah, fair enough, you raise some good points. If you're looking for a Linux which is as close to Unix as you can get it, clearly Mandrake isn't for you. Yes, some things are broken, but the bits that work far outweigh the bits that are broken. I don't have many test applications that allocate memory in 4k chunks in a while(1) loop, for example...

As for POSIX.2, fair enough. As I said, the list was last updated in 1993, so I wouldn't expect it to have still been in progress (O.K. its a standards body, but over 10 years would be a bit much). I won't be reviewing the standard just yet, though, unless I can get a copy for cheap!

sh-utils is there, by the way

rpm -q sh-utils<br>
sh-utils-2.0-13mdk

I'm well aware of what RedHat and Mandrake did with GCC, and yes I am well aware of why it isn't really 2.96, thanks though. Thats the version it reports back, though, and we both know what we're talking about when I say gcc-2.96.

Still, I'll stick with Mandrake (Why don't I use Windows XP? Because I don't like Windows XP. All I really want is an RPM based distro that ships with KDE; Mandrake has that). At least until Syllable is a little better, than I can start using something I'm far more comfortable with.

Re:Lets get over the Mandrake thing, please?

[k8to]

I have no problem with a linux which is not UNIX. Personally I'd love to see a BeOS or AmigaDos on the linux kernel. However, Mandrake goes to the trouble to provide bash and so forth, but their default install won't run a normal unix script. Oops. I consider this deceit of customers, and a burden for developers of Linux apps.

Allocation of 4k chunks was not the problem a broken compiler which could fail for trivial applications was the problem That it doesn't fail for all trivial applications is not terribly redeeming.

Mind you, I didn't suggest shutils was missing from Mandrake, but missing from the default install. "Non-Compliant by default" is right up there with "It works for me" as computer industry wrongthink. Mandrake had a nice shiny checkbox for "shell utilities" which was unchecked by default. Or maybe it was "Command line tools". Imperfect memory.

RPM based distro that ships with KDE? SuSE. You get all that as well as smart developers who know what they're doing. (Of course all distros come with KDE nowadays, but i'm assuming mean as a nicely configured default). Of course it isn't worth reinstalling, learning quirks, but it's worth it to me as a developer to resist new deployment of a system which makes my life harder.

Best wishes with syllable. Anything that explores new ground or even makes a new attempt at familiar ground which is yet to be mastered is an important endeavour in my book.

Re:Lets get over the Mandrake thing, please?

[Vanders]

Well, I agree with your point concerning "It works for me". I consider it one of the most braindead responses one can offer for an argument. However, we clearly have very different experiences regarding Mandrake. The box I was sat at when I checked for sh-utils was a custom install, granted, but I do not remember ever explictly having to tell it to install sh-utils. Obviously, something is broken with Mandrakes dependency management.

As for SuSE, well, I've tried it once or twice at various versions, and I've never really felt comfortable with it. The fact that YaST2 is non-free bothers me somewhat, and I've also had issues with hardware detctection and driver configuration when I last tried SuSE. Inertia is also an important point; I already have Mandrake installed, and I find switching to a new system a painful experience at the best of times.

Thank you for support of Syllable. Hopefully we can build a usable system, and then I can abandon Linux all together and stop having to keep track of all these slightly different distributions! :)

Errr....

[cswiii]

That is possibly the most confusing story description I've ever read on Slashdot.

And before my morning coffee, too! Bad Slashdot, bad, no Warcraft for you today!

Re:sheesh....tolerance?

[sylvester]

Have you ever noticed that the editors don't seem to edit the quoted text? I like that. I think they should take the best/first submission. Moreover, did you notice that the story was from a Japanese source? And that they "by/for" mistake is one easily made by someone who (probably) speaks more languages than you do? Did you have any trouble at all understanding the story? Would you prefer slashdot stories take another 8 hours to hit, so they can be vetted by an editor? Slashdot is ad hoc (both in the literal and colloquial sense of ad hoc...) news. If you want cleanly editted news, read ZDNet. Notice how they don't have as much variety or community?

Just wondering.

-Rob

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.

Re:Clarifications; did SRA spend their $mil well?

[sam_handelman]

Choke. Sorry.

SRA will continue to operate in an independent fashion, however, at least for a while (I think).

Turbolinux will continue to operate in an independent fashion. It's morning, my bad. The irony of mocking someone's bad syntax and then getting words reversed in my own posting is not lost on me.

SCORE 2 Insightful?

[fdisk3hs]

Stupid troll can't make any distro work except Mandrake. Where is the insight? He probably reinstalls from scratch every two days because it won't boot into X anymore...

MOD HIM DOWN.
TROLL.
KILL.

BAD MODERATOR. NO DONUT.

Re:SCORE 2 Insightful?

[mbourgon]

Hey, at least I didn't lose any karma on that. Actually, I ran Debian (first CLOS, then Debian) for about 2 years, decided to try out Lycoris, hated that, went Red Hat (um, why doesn't redhat-network-config get installed by default?), over to Mandrake (using currently), and am playing with SuSE.

Oddly enough, X died a week or so ago on my Mandrake box, so I'll go fix later this week, when I have some time. Why is it my fault if I install an EASY TO USE distro and then I don't want to learn all the intracacies in order to get a GUI? This is why Linux isn't on the desktop yet.

My goal on playing with all the distros periodically is to find one that our end users could deal with, and that would make a nice, easy, friendly workstation/server for me. So that I don't ever need Windows.

Oh and the insight - the original question. What the hell differentiates TurboLinux? (Now I know - Japanese support)

And some more -

Lycoris - really wants to be XP.
CLOS - Only OS I'd trust my parents with, even outdated as it is (and yes, I config'd it to update packages - and that broke it utterly)
Xandros - if it ever comes out, will be the OS I give my parents.
Gentoo - a true roll your own linux. It'll finish compiling next week. ;)

Re:SCORE 2 Insightful?

[Arandir]

The best thing about Corel LinuxOS was that it was small. Really. It asked you about three or four questions, then installed a very minimal default. You got a KDE desktop and that was it. On that desktop was an icon that allowed you to download a million other packages, but you didn't do that during the install.

I watched a greenhorn newbie install SuSE once. It was painful. He didn't have enough room for a complete full install, so he spent hours choosing between jed, joe, jove, emacs, xemacs, nvi, vim, elvis, pico and and a million other text editors. A newbie shouldn't have to choose between 7000 packages during the install. That is ridiculous.

An easy to use Linux installer will install just the basics necessary to get to a desktop. Even that minimal set of software is still going to give the user ten times the functionality of the full Windows install.

Re:SCORE 2 Insightful?

[mbourgon]

I liked it quite a bit. It made Debian easy, which is no small feat. Someone mentioned that a minimal Unix install is nice, and Debian does that, and so Corel did. What I liked about it was that it was fairly easy to run - all the basic stuff and end-user needed, the Corel Update (apt-get GUI), and it installs on almost anything, without asking you specific details about all your hardware. It just frickin worked. Nice.

Oh, and Xandros' web site offers a download of Corel Linux 2.

Wanted: /. Editor (Experience with English a plus)

[Lindril]

"Currently, They were sold by $1 million."

All your base are belong to us.

Someone cue the Queen baseline...

[MidKnight]

"Dum dum dum ... another one bites the dust."

Hindsight being 20-20 and all, but I don't think this should surprise anyone. During the late 90's lots of techies were excited about Linux because of the freedom it gave them in twiddling the bits of modern operating system themselves. Meanwhile, lots of venture capitalists & MBA's were excited because they saw in Linux an opportunity to start up their own personal Microsoft with virtually zero resources allocated to creating a product. So, throw some marketing $$$ at it, ride the wave, and soon they'd have their own fiefdom of clients running their operating system. They could leverage that installed base to make related deals and rake in the cash.

So, between the techies & the MBA's, who do you think is still excited? (Rhetorical question)

Now, enter popular Linux-related business plan #2: selling a "solution" instead of a software product. Great plan, right? IBM Global Services does that to the tune of $35 billion in revenue! Yeah, but IBM uses their huge hardware profit margins to seed their services plans. Plus they already had Fortune 100 clients as part of their previously installed base to draw from. Oh yeah, and they also have freaking enormous economies of scale to use as well.

My point to this little ramble is that most Linux distros suffer from overly optimistic business plans that, especially in today economy, just don't work. If a Linux distribution is the shining center of your business plan, then in the end you'll be forced to sit at the children's table when it comes to dividing up the revenue pie. So, stories like TurboLinux are pretty common these days, and probably will continue to be for the forseeable future.

Now where'd I put that Queen CD....

--Mid

Re:Someone cue the Queen baseline...

[HiThere]

As long as the distributions keep coming, and stay GPL, it's worth it.

It would be really nice to have a fortune, but I don't waste my money on lottery tickets. What Linux buys, what the GPL buys, is freedom. I need to make a living too, and dreams are nice. But I can make a living working for someone else, as long as the software is Linux, and if I help them succeed, I'm still moving it forwards.

Now, in acutality, I'm in a basically windows shop, and I only have two copies of Linux installed at work, one of them dual-boot. But I have been refusing to install Windows software over license issues. Most people think I'm crazy, and that the licenses don't matter, but not all. Not anymore. Too much evidence. So by keeping Linux present, I'm keeping an option open.
Currently I'm moving a project from MS Access to Java. Well, Java isn't perfect, but it's cross-platform. And that's another application that isn't tied to windows. Every step helps.

So, TurboLinux had a bad business model or method. Too bad. I wish that they had been more successful. I hope that they are successful as a part of the new corporation. But if not, it sounds like there are Korean and Chinese distributions coming up that could fill their footsteps. And appearantly China intends to honor the GPL. (If they didn't, it wouldn't be Linux, no matter what it said on the box.)

Is this a post from the future?

[Viol8]

Whats XF96Config when its at home?

Re:Is this a post from the future?

[Vanders]

Its Xf86config with a typo. I'm sure you've noticed how close those pesky 8 and 9 keys are.

LINUX/FREE SOFTWARE INFLATED BY TECH BUBBLE

[slashnot007]

Is it possible the current quality in linux has come about because of Tech investment bubble? That is all those investment dollars that never led to a profit did go to pay salaries of programmers who helped advance Linux and Gnu and all the other parts of the distributions.

We may not want to admit this but maybe this is what allowed LINUX to catch up to Microsoft in userfreindlyness and establish a minimal set of applications. For example, would star office or any of the other office suites have reached their final form or have even tech support available had not their hosting companies like Sun profited from the surge of investment cash?

Sure you might point to some app that was a good bussiness decision for a company to have produced in hindsight, but how many other compaines tried and died in the mean time. I argue that it was the tech bubble the allowed experimentation and risk taking to creat these apps

Since the tech bubble has popped maybe so will the explosion in linux software and linux quality. If so then it might be reasonable to ask if the linux and possibly gnu (anti-) bussiness models, indeed the whole free-software movement will no longer be good models.

open source may survive but it will look more like a BSD model rather than a GPL.

Re:LINUX/FREE SOFTWARE INFLATED BY TECH BUBBLE

[WinterSolstice]

You have some good points. I don't know that I agree that all of the quality software came from investment captial, however. I do think that some of the major steps forward did, and I am positive that the buzz generated attracted more quality developers than ever before.

I disagree that it will all go away, since it existed before venture capital, and will continue to exist after venture capital. Some people have an actual opinion about their OS now, and that is an improvement worth any amount of money. Nobody considered that 5 years ago. I worked in a business where we ran OS/2 in order to use SNA, host emulation, and remote desktop control and we were ridiculed. We then went to Windows, and suffered seriously. Windows wasn't ready then, and is barely ready now.

I think that the companies who have realized that there are actual choices in platform are the biggest winners. It's no longer rubberstamp. There is now that moment of hesitation... MS Access, or Postgres? Should I use x, or y for our firewall?

Let's also not forget that Linux as an embedded OS is taking major strides. It's everything a lot of people want in an embedded OS.

So I don't agree that it's over. I think that it will just adjust.

-WS

No, This how linux developement WAS paid for.

[slashnot007]

No no no... that 99 million and many more like it was what raised linux up from the primordial soup in the first place. the real question is where is the next 99 million coming from? Microsoft has it, but will the linux community? The future may mean that BSD, and companies like apple, will be the way unix can pay for itself. The good news is that having grown the unix install base, the cost per copy of the commerical unix will drop (regard how SUN used to charge an intolerable price for solaris but thats because they only had a few users to pay for all their dev costs). Maybe this will allow unix to be price cometitive with MS windows.

Is it possible the current quality in linux has come about because of Tech investment bubble? That is all those investment dollars that never led to a profit did go to pay salaries of programmers who helped advance Linux and Gnu and all the other parts of the distributions.

We may not want to admit this but maybe this is what allowed LINUX to catch up to Microsoft in userfreindlyness and establish a minimal set of applications. For example, would star office or any of the other office suites have reached their final form or have even tech support available had not their hosting companies like Sun profited from the surge of investment cash?

Sure you might point to some app that was a good bussiness decision for a company to have produced in hindsight, but how many other compaines tried and died in the mean time. I argue that it was the tech bubble the allowed experimentation and risk taking to creat these apps

Since the tech bubble has popped maybe so will the explosion in linux software and linux quality. If so then it might be reasonable to ask if the linux and possibly gnu (anti-) bussiness models, indeed the whole free-software movement will no longer be good models.

open source may survive but it will look more like a BSD model rather than a GPL.

Re:Care to point it out then?

[yatest5]

I think you may find the shit joke had been done several times before even those two trailblazers in front of me had done it

Thanks, but I'm spoken for

[Vanders]

I'm trying to go one better with Open Source. Hey, you never know, we might just do it.

If not, then who knows? :)

Re:Wanted: /. Editor (Experience with English a pl

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, I still want to get paid for bad spelling and poor english. In fact, I want to get paid to sit around and reject worthwhile articles while posting complete and utter crap (including fucking blatant advertising) all while having poor english grammar and spelling!

Clustered filesystems...

[tjrw]

If you're talking about OCFS for Linux (announced at LinuxWorld), it's nothing like AdvFS or a "real" clustered filesystem. It is intended to allow Oracle 9i RAC to operate in a filesystem environment and is explicitly documented as not being intended for use as a true filesystem replacement. A brief glance at the current implementation will show you why. Although it offers most of the standard filesystem semantics, performance for use as a general-purpose filesystem (particularly metadata-update intensive) would be quite horrible. Since there is hardly any metadata activity when running Oracle on the filesystem, this would not be a problem.

Tim

Now TurboLinux has a new name...

[Chagatai]

The Japanese, in a new marketing strategy, have decided to change the name from TurboLinux to Supaa Numbaa 1 Happy Cow Bang Lucky Henshin Mega Turbo Linux!!!

Re:sheesh....tolerance?

[sehryan]

Would you prefer slashdot stories take another 8 hours to hit, so they can be vetted by an editor?

Yeah, the /. editors have more important things they have to be doing instead of editing blurbs like...like...coming up with new words for karma levels, and making sure that ads for .NET always show up on any anti-MS article they post. Oh, and coming up with new excuses to not cache the pages they link to. These things are more important to the community than you might think! Show some appreciation!

If you want cleanly editted news, read ZDNet. Notice how they don't have as much variety or community?

And I know that after I flame an editor for a crap post, and then I am flamed in return...God, my sense of community is tripled. God bless the /. XPerience!

Re:Wanted: /. Editor (Experience with English a pl

[Artifex]

The editor didn't write that. He was quoting the person who sent in the submission.

Re:This is why you can't pay people to write a fre

[rootslash]

Actually it's why linux will continue to succeed dumbass. One company can go belly up and it means shit all for linux as an OS.

That could be a Martha Stewart recipe...

[mnemotronic]

How to convert that pesky $100 million into a much more managable $1 million.

Step 1. Put it into a Linux company

You're done! There, wasn't that easy? And notice how it compliments the seat cushions.

Next week, we'll show you how to use your personal contacts and insider information to convert that $1 million right back into $100 million! Stay tuned!

Re:Wanted: /. Editor (Experience with English a pl

[laserjet]

That is true... but he is an editor. It would not be against the law to edit.

It's like those cookies

[JMZero]

They paid more than they expected for Lunix, now they're distributing it for free to get back at that stupid manager who they thought meant $2.50 when he said two-fifty but really meant $250.

Forward this on!

.

Re:Wanted: /. Editor (Experience with English a pl

[aardvarkjoe]

I shudder to think what that sentence would have said had Taco touched it.

The entire linux business is that which dies last

[gelfling]

It's pure evolution baby. The winner is the last one breathing. And the prize is dominion over the boneyard.

Sheesh there used to be a real computer industry now it's just some shitty Soviet monopoly and everthing else is on life support. And the monopoly is on life support too.

What's wrong with $1Million?

[zrk]

Didn't you hear, they hired Dr. Evil to sell off the business??

oops, wrong story

[jakob_grimm]

TurboLinux dies

Threw away cash with both hands

Mighty few users

Reinvent the wheel

[SomeOtherGuy]

I can think of some pretty cool stuff to do with 100 meeelion dollars. Reinventing the wheel is not one of them. Can you imagine if you invested 100 million into applications and left the distributions to the community? If I had a nickel for every dollar spent on making an "easier install" I could hire some pretty good people for a long time to work on some real apps. Think about it -- even a bad install would only take a day or two....What really would stand out is what do you do once you have it installed? That could be years of usage -- vs. the difference between a 1 hour install and a 2 day install.

On the flipside -- the Eazel (sp?) people seemed to be pretty good at floating many million into what in the end was little more than a slow file manager. Proving that not only distributions can go broke. I say if you have that kind of money -- take it and pay the people (teams) who are already working part time on existing "killer areas" (gimp, sane, usb support, abiword, gnumeric, etc) and pay them to do it fulltime as a real job with real deadlines, etc...etc...

Re:sheesh....tolerance?

[gmhowell]

No, the editors are up to something much more important than any of the things you imagine. Like playing a game that most of us finished two months ago.

To answer the inevitable question...

[MoNsTeR]

..."who the hell uses Turbolinux?"

I do.

It's like Redhat without the bullshit. It has great console-based configuration programs. It's i686 optimized (no longer that big of a deal though).

I hope this sale won't affect my favorite distro :(

..debian..

[gl4ss]

is imho just as easy to use as any other distribution, most of the stuff can be apt-getted or for convenience use dselect(actually, all stuff that's needed).

and updating is just simple matter of apt-get update ; apt-get upgrade

and my linux's way much cleaner since i started using debian and not such a hackjob my redhat installation was coupla of years back.

compiling stuff is a breeze too, just apt-get necessary devel stuff.

and if i'd like it easy to use as in go clickityclick i can(and did) apt-get kde3(unofficial debs tho), after i had apt-getted gnome and seen it to be too slow for my linux comp to handle.

number one rule for easy workability(is that even a word?) is as follows: "IF IT WON'T WORK, IT AIN'T EASY".

Re:Wanted: /. Editor (Experience with English a pl

[WNight]

Actually, it would be considered unprofessional to present a quote and edit it transparently.

And what's the harm with reading something with stilted English? It did come from someone who likely didn't speak English natively...

If you don't like it here, leave. Seriously, I wish you would.

Being Geeky fails

[ToasterTester]

TurboLinux failed because they never understood that typical distro customers are mainly desktop users. Desktop users want a GUI frilly multi-media, office suite stuffage. Turbo had some nice text based utilities, came fairly secure out of the box, and they spent a lot on server features. Their TurboCluster load balancer, then distributed application tools they did with IBM and other tools. They focused a lot on the corporate market that wasn't ready for them.

Re:sheesh....tolerance?

[Fizzol]

Some of us are *still* waiting to play that game that most of you finished two months ago.

*Stares at unused $60 box on shelf*

*gumble* *Linux client* *grumble* *kick bioware* *grumble*

More Info

[soramimicake]

Press Release from Turbolinux Inc.

Press Release from Turbolinux Japan (in Japanese)

Another article from NikkeiBP (in Japanese)

The main points are:

• Turbolinux Inc. sold Turbolinux Japan K.K. (its Japanese subsidary) to SRA. (This is the $1 mil. transaction according to Slashdot Japan (in Japanese))
• Turbolinux Japan K.K. will become the new Turbolinux Inc.
• Turbolinux Inc. also sold all its Linux distribution business, logo, trademarks to SRA, but the price is not yet disclosed.
• SRA is also planning to buy the Chinese and Korean joint ventures between Turbolinux Inc. and local companies.
• The old Turbolinux Inc. will change its name to CenterRex and focus on software it developed like PowerCockpit or EnFusion.

So yes, Turbolinux Inc. seems to be getting out of the distribution business altogether and they are not going to retain the name and sell Turbos :-)

Re:UnitedLinux: American Motors, 1954

[Anna Merikin]

United Linux reminds me of when Nash, Hudson and Wyllys combined (Packard and Studebaker did the same for the same reason) to try to salvage businesses that could not compete with the giants (GM, Ford and Chrysler.)

While AMC became one company and United Linux will remain (so it says) a group of independent companies, the economies of scale they hope for will not mean a thing without enough market share to make it work.

This is not to give RH a win by default; at the same time (1954) that I was a high school student looking toward becoming an automotive engineer, GM sent a rep to talk during career day, and he predicted in the near future, there would be only three carmakers in the world: GM, Ford and Chrysler as there was no way to gather enough capitalization and market share anymore.

This was in the same year Soichiro Honda screwed his first washing-machine motor onto a bicycle frame....

Re:sheesh....tolerance?

[gmhowell]

I'm looking forward to the Linux client. Plan on playing again. This time as an evil magic user of some sort.

Re:Ever tried a mac?

[User 956]

You sound like the sort of user has grown beyond boasting specs to getting something accomplished.

We'd love to have you.

What are you, in a cult? Does he have to shave his head and kill his parents to join, or is it just the standard "give us all your money and worldly posessions"?

Re:Read this:

[Prothonotar]

I believe that should be "you're stupid". Thank you.

I used to work for TurboLinux...

[BigWhale]

... sort of... :) I wasn't their employee, but I worked for a company that developed ClusterServer and Enfuzion. No, they weren't developed in Japan or USA, but mostly in Slovenia (That's Europe... :P ). :)

I was working in IT and helping with everything Cluster Server too and later I was porting TurboLinux to IBM's RS6000 and AS400 platforms.

It's a shame that TurboLinux went down, why I never understood, bad marketing I guess. It was fun working for them, I don't care about the company, but there are hours of work that are now completely lost and who knows what will happen with the Linux part of Turbo. :) Maybe they'll continue to develop ClusterServer, it was pretty cool load balancing software with all the bells and whistles or Enfuzion. Or make them OpenSource... That'd be cool... ;>

So much for the Turbo... Heh...