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?

[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]

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!

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?

[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: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.

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.

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?

[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?

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

[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.

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

[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.

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.

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?

[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?

[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.

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: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:UnitedLinux

[jcoy42]

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

Profit!

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: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.

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

[Lindril]

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

All your base are belong to us.

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

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:UnitedLinux

[RevAaron]

Yarrrrrrr!

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

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.)

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

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: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: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.

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.

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 :(

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.

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: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.