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

Sold their linux business?

[Spudley]

Turbolinux Sells Linux Business

So does that mean they only sell turbos now?

sheesh....editors?

[Raleel]

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

Re:UnitedLinux

[reaper20]

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

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.

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.

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: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.

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