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TSL Is Dead, Long Live TSL
Masta writes "Trustix AS, the company behind
Trustix Secure Linux filed for bankruptcy on monday. Erlend Midttun and Christian Toldnes, two former employees of Trustix AS and the main developers behind Trustix Secure Linux, founded a new company, named Tawie Technologies AS.
They continue the work on TSL, under the new name Tawie Server Linux. All former volunteers and contributors declared their support for the new distribution, so 'TSL is dead, long live TSL.'"
If lots of OSS companies start going bust then starting up again, will that shake investor confidence in the other companies (eg, redhat) even though their business model may be sound?
This is truly sadening to see an OSS company with a functionnal and viable product go down.
Looking at it from the business perspective, does that mean that there was no demand for the product? Or is the business model that is not viable??? I vote for the second option. Open Source is nice on paper but it struggles in a world driven by profit margins.
It kinda ressembles the Church business model. Have faith and contribute... Some have faith and will contribute. Some have faith but need some proof to be real believers (profit?). And the rest, they just don't care...
However, one thing still bothers me. Apparently, it is O.K to spend cash like water, rip of your creditors and declare bankruptcy, and then just do a little paperwork and carry on as before?
Depends. First, this is the whole idea of having a "business", "company" or whatever: You invest in something, but have a fixed amount of money to loose, because you can go bankrupt and start all over. When you start a bussiness, you can be sure, that if the business goes down, you will typically loose money, but it will not break your neck. This is not different from an investor who will also only give the company some fixed amount, which he may loose, or get back sometime.
The problem is another one here, though. Normally, a company that goes bankrupt, leaves some value. Say, a manufacturing company leaves machines, vehicles and the likes. These are f.e. auctioned, and so the amount of money lost often is kept within a limit. Likewise, a software company normally leaves a bunch of source code (some may call it "intellectual property"), and the rights to this code can be sold to another investor.
With open source, all the source code is public, and there is no point in selling it (except you transfer the copyright, but that's difficult with something that builds upon another GPL'd product, but that's another story). Thus, at any time, the value of the "intellectual property" contained within the open-source company is effectively zero.
That doesn't mean that open source is worthless or companies building their business model on open source are deemed to fail. It just means that investors must be aware of the special "intellectual property" issues that arise in such a scenario.