VA Linux Systems a Fortune "Cool Company"

VA Linux Systems has been selected as a Fortune Magazine "Cool Company". You can get the whole scoop on the Fortune site. The article talks about some of the people that have been been hired in by VA recently for the Linux Labs as well - with Jon "Mad Dog" Hall being one of them.

Comments

San Mehat's oscilloscope

[Anonymous Coward]

What's the story ? One of those 'scopes that has a PC core ?

Re:San Mehat's oscilloscope

[chrisd]

Yep, it's a really bitchin digital storage scope, so it's got a pc backend to handle the data work. I don't know how far he has gotten on interfacing the hardware.

The probes on the thing are un-freaking believeable, really things of beauty, they each come with accessories in their own little leatherette case.

Chris DiBona
VA Linux Systems

--
Grant Chair, Linux Int.
VP, SVLUG

VA really hiring people for the community?

[Anonymous Coward]

If VA really hires people to 'give them back to the community', why has Leonard Zubkoff stopped maintaining the SCSI layer after he joined VA Research? According to the current kernel sources (2.2.10) - there are no references to *anyone* from VA Research having ever contributed major Linux kernel code. Is VA Research keeping kernel improvements to itself??

Re:VA really hiring people for the community?

[Anonymous Coward]

He is probably working on the Merced thing!

Re:VA really hiring people for the community?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is Leonard N. Zubkoff replying...

I'm afraid that I don't have a lot of free time to participate on slashdot, but
I would like to comment briefly on this. I will respond below to the comments
about my resignation as SCSI subsystem maintainer, but first I will comment
about VA in general. All improvements to the Linux kernel made by employees of
VA Linux Systems are made available in source form along with the system we
ship, and are also made available to the community at least by then, and
usually far sooner as we participate in ongoing Linux development. There are
at least three reasons you won't necessarily see our names in the kernel
source: (1) many of us retain personal email accounts we use for our
participation, so you wouldn't find the VA name; (2) we don't necessarily
attach our name or an edit history entry to every file we touch; and (3) some
of our work, most notably on the Merced/IA-64 port, cannot yet be released to
the community. When you see the names H.J. Lu (since January) and Ted Ts'o
(recently), both long time contributors to Linux development, they are VA
employees whose work is being given to the community. We also have three
people working on IA-64 currently, and a number of Open Source project
contributors on staff (XFree86, Enlightenment). In the last year and a half, I
personally have been concentrating primarily on the Mylex DAC960 RAID
controller driver work and on support for large Intel server systems; you might
not think that a RAID driver would take that much effort, but there's an
ongoing process of working with new products, getting the vendor to acknowledge
and fix bugs, and so on.


Now on to SCSI and my own directions...

I decided to resign as maintainer of the SCSI subsystem long before I joined VA
Linux Systems (then VA Research). My reasons for doing so were primarily that
I was spending most of my Linux hacking time developing the driver for Mylex
PCI RAID controllers, and that with no further BusLogic/Mylex SCSI host
adapters being produced I had less reason to be working on SCSI in general.
The SCSI subsystem is best maintained by someone who is also maintaining and
supporting a SCSI driver that's undergoing active development, in my opinion.

More specifically, Eric Youngdale and I discussed some designs for improvements
to the SCSI subsystem at a Linux Expo a year or two ago. Eric worked on the
implementation, and eventually it was accepted into the 2.1 kernel series. At
that point in time, I was occupied enough with my DAC960 work that I did not
have time to understand the changes he'd made nor to maintain them; in short, I
was no longer the expert on the SCSI subsystem. I urged Eric to take over the
maintainership once again, but his time committments did not permit him to do
so. I officially resigned as maintainer in December 1997:

From lnz@dandelion.com Mon Dec 22 23:12:06 1997
Date: Mon, 22 Dec 1997 23:11:40 -0800
From: "Leonard N. Zubkoff"
To: Linus Torvalds
Subject: SCSI Subsystem

Linus,

I believe the time has come for me to resign as official SCSI Subsystem
Maintainer. I've been considering resigning for quite a while and haven't
taken action up until now, but I think the time has finally come. I
believe Eric's changes to the SCSI Subsystem are a good thing, but I don't
really consider myself in a good position to maintain that code or manage
its becoming mainstream, so this is probably the right time to bow out. If
he's willing, and I've asked him to think about the possibility though its
obviously your decision, I think Eric would be in a better position to act
as maintainer.

Leonard

Finally, on June 18th, 1998, I finally sent Linus a patch removing my name from
the MAINTAINERS file since he had not done so.

Re:VA really hiring people for the community?

[Mandrake]

How about Ted T'so? can you say ext2?
maybe HJ Lu? Libc5, NFS, etc.
there surely aren't 25 people working in the labs, but there are about 10. plus we've got 5+ people working on the merced port (direct kernel work)

just a quick note...
--
Geoff Harrison (http://mandrake.net)
Senior Software Engineer - VA Linux Labs (http://www.valinux.com)

Red Hat > VA

[Anonymous Coward]

Rumour has it that Rasterman, of
Enlightenment fame who just left Red Hat, is
joining the team at VA. ;o

Ahh.. the migration begins. ;)

Re:Red Hat > VA

[Anonymous Coward]

Everytime I've seen him on IRC his dns was inside varesearch.com. I am beginning to wonder the same thing. :)

In IPO space, yes they're rivals

[Anonymous Coward]

IPO money is why RedHat and VA got serious investments (among several motivations). If RedHat and VA have their IPO's close together, they may possibly dilute each others stock price.

Not that that shit matters in the long run....
Remember, this is FORBES....

VA Linux Systems Yuk, I liked the name VA Research

[Anonymous Coward]

Good thing their old url works, cause I liked the old name...too bad some nut decided to change a perfect name.

Re:RedHat a rival? SuSE ...thoughts

[Anonymous Coward]

SuSE 6.1 kicks Redhat 6.0 around...VA undoubtedly decided to go with the buggy and over-commercialized redhat over a nice os like SuSE Linux.

Re:VA Linux now in Canada!

[lars]

This is great news. Hopefully they recognize that there's a lot of good talent in Canada, and will do some of their R&D up here. Corel has always hired a lot of University co-ops, and VA could find some great talent by tapping into the Waterloo co-op program. I know a lot of people (like me :) ) would love to work for a Linux company. My idea of a dream workterm used to be working as a programmer at a place like RHAD Labs. My aspirations have changed a little since then -- I'm more interested in large scale OO software design -- but still, it's nice to know that something along those lines might soon be possible. Also, the prospect of full-time employment in the Valley after graduation is very enticing for a lot of people.

Rest of the list

[abischof]

Here's the rest of the list.

Alex Bischoff
---

RedHat a rival?

[Andy Dodd]

The author should have looked at VA's website.

a) VA is a hardware company, RH is software. 2 different markets.

b) VA is a customer of RedHat - All of their systems that I've looked at so far come with RH 5.2 (What happened to the SuSE partnership that VA touts in some of their LJ ads? And what about RH6?)

Re:VA & RH6

[Andy Dodd]

OK, that sounds good.

I wonder why they don't put up such an explanation on their site...

Mad Dog at VA?

[felicity]

When did this happen? Is he a consultant for them, or did they actually pull him away from Compaq?

Re:Mad Dog at VA?

[chrisd]

No, he is not a consultant, he is a full time employee.

Chris DiBona
VA Linux Systems

--
Grant Chair, Linux Int.
VP, SVLUG

Re:VA Linux now in Canada!

[GrenDel Fuego]

Both have come from Corel and have great backgrounds, Jason was a Marketing Manager for the Netwinder and I seem to recall that Zack helped port Strong Arm to the Netwinder as well? (correct me if I'm wrong)

I'd have to say you're wrong.
Strong Arm is the processor used in the Netwinder. That would be like saying someone ported Pentium to the Compaq Presario.

Maybe he helped port Linux to the Strongarm for the Netwinder.

Linux?

[Squeeze Truck]

Not to nit-pick, but VA is a system vendor -- not a linux contributor.

This story has nothing to do with Linux. Might I suggest VA have their own section?

Re:Linux?

[luge]

Umm, actually, they have several employees dedicated full-time to coding.

Cool Article

[manitee]

Good article. I did not know that the VA folks were former pals with the Yahoo fellas. I wonder if Yoohoo has made any financial investment in VA.

I think that VA is a good company, and a great alternative to traditional hardware vendors. Even though Dell etc. are selling Linux systems, I would feel better buying from VA simply because they have been 100% linux from the get-go.

Does anyone know an approximate date for the IPO? Is it just in the planning phase?

Favourite quote from the article: "...and Geoff "Mandrake" Harrison, a user-interface expert who wants to make the Linux interface "suck less."

The List

[manitee]

Here is the complete list of cool companies, not in any particular order.

Cool Companies:
Intro
Third Voice
nterTrust
Frequency Technology
Financial Engines
myCFO
boo.com
VA Linux Systems
Bidcom
HomeGrocer
InfoRay
Sycamore Networks
Rhythms NetConnections

so cool.. their hot..

[Juliet]

i never realized how hip fortune was.. is that better or worse than wired "hot/not" list?

*smile*

VA & RH6

[luge]

I spoke to them yesterday (I think i'm going to order a box from them today) and asked about that. Apparently, "their" 6 is not yet stable enough for their taste- they add a variety of mods and stuff that they want to make sure are perfectly integrated with their boxes before they ship. Also, "their" 5.2 ships with KDE and a 2.2 kernel (for SMP) so they don't feel all that pressed to upgrade immediately. I'm going to strip it and put Debian on it immediately anyway, but hey... more power to them for waiting until they get it right.
~luge
(P.S.- the sales guy who told me all this was pissed at the delay too- he says he is sick of answering 6.0 questions :)

Re:VA & RH6

[luge]

Beats me...

More traditional business model

[scrutty]

I'm not too surprised. Being a hardware vendor who offers preconfigured server/workstation systems with support and maintenance packages has got to be a 'mini - IBM' business model that traditionally-minded market analysts can readily translate their models to.

Companies like RedHat break this mould a little further - by having a service and support business based around a software product that they don't own and can't really control in a market they can't readily predict.

A little harder for the aforementioned traditionilists to digest perhaps ?

Re: Zack, Linux + Strongarm + Netwinder

[a.out]

"Maybe he helped port Linux to the Strongarm for the Netwinder"

Yep that's it!
All in all the guy's a star.

I kinda had the emfasis on the wrong salable :)

VA Linux now in Canada!

[a.out]

About a week ago I got the chance to speak with Jason A. Straw, Canadian Marketing Manager and his teckie, Zack.

Both have come from Corel and have great backgrounds, Jason was a Marketing Manager for the Netwinder and I seem to recall that Zack helped port Strong Arm to the Netwinder as well? (correct me if I'm wrong)

But the point is that VA is now in Canada and will soon be located in the Toronto area! They are taking the community seriously, They are listening to us.

That's news for Canadain nerds, stuff that matters eh?