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VA hints more about going public

Posted by Hemos on from the peez-larry-rob&i-just-want-some-stock dept.

An anonymous bastard writes "I'll be covering LWCE next week, and so I'm on a list of e-mail addresses for "the press" who get invited to interview "Linux People" for their publications. One of the e-mails was from the PR firm for VA Linux Systems (formerly VA Research) asking if I'd want to interview Larry Augustin. Interesting to note was this phrase: "Larry is one of the keynote speakers at the show, and has a lot of VA-related news and annct's to brief you on before VA goes into its quiet period." Apparently they've got a quiet period coming up, which means Linux IPO Number Two is coming. " Well, I've had a nice conversation with the press person at VA-they wanted to assure me that they are not headed directly into the quiet period post-LWCE. It'll be sometime soon, but don't hold your breath waiting for it-at least for the next couple weeks. *grin* Bottom line: Still waiting.

4 of 70 comments (clear)

  1. Not really the case. by chrisd · · Score: 3
    I want to say this here , right now. VA IS NOT IN THE DISTRIBUTION BUSINESS we take red hat and recompile it and add code to the kernel to support our hardware configurations. We write drivers to accomodate hardware we want to sell and make that software freely available under whatever license the developer prefers. We ship updates to our customers for thier machines.

    VA used to support more distros and we will be supporting more in the future (look at our hiring of Joey and Sean for debian) it's just that while we were growing exponentially, we had to grow fast, so we cut the product line down and settled on our most popular distribution until we had the bandwidth to handle more.

    Again, VA has it's own machine configuration and not it's own distribution As far as standing in line for the IPO that's your call, but the reason we hire the people we do is to make it possible to create the best linux machines we can. That's our value.

    We do have machines under 2000$. And as far as AMD goes, we'd love to have a broader product line and include them, and we may later, but it's more like why we chose red hat above, we had to choose what we wanted to ship a -lot- of and concentrate on it.

    So there you go.

    Chris DiBona
    VA Linux Systems

    --
    Grant Chair, Linux Int.
    VP, SVLUG

    --
    Co-Editor, Open Sources
    Open Source Program Manager, Google, Inc.
  2. IPO? not today boys and girls by Mandrake · · Score: 3

    I hate to disappoint everyone, but we're not exactly announcing an IPO today.
    I do find it really amusing to come to work and see everyone buzzing about us going IPO because they read it on slashdot, though. We were all running around like chickens with our heads cut off trying to figure out who it was that sent this email out, and then after I read the email that this guy ACTUALLY got, I thought to myself "oh, he figures we're going public just because we say we're IPO track? oh nevermind, this guy's just a donut" *grin*
    enough for now.
    --
    Geoff Harrison (http://mandrake.net)
    Senior Software Engineer - VA Linux Labs (http://www.valinux.com)

    --
    Geoff "Mandrake" Harrison
    Some Random UI Hacker
  3. "Buy Linux"... by pb · · Score: 3


    Gee, at this rate, we can buy a Linux portfolio of funds... I'll just wait until I can "buy Linux" as a mutual fund or something. Maybe a Penguin family of funds?

    At this rate, we should have it in a year or two, about when we achieve world domination for the next eon or so. ;)

    --
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
  4. Questions answered... by chrisd · · Score: 3
    I'm sure Mandrake and Ras may answer this, but here's why. And yes we've hired raster, but we'll announce that officially with some other key people we've brought on.

    VA Feels that the desktop will be a huge part of the business. We love E. So there you go. And we write tools all the time that could use a good interface and I don't have as much time as I'd like to write interfaces anymore. Hence, Mandrake , ras and Michael Jennings.

    I have no eta's for you. Sorry.

    As far as BSD goes, VA concentrates on Linux only and that won't change any time in the forseeable future. What's funny is a bunch of companies buy our boxes and run bsd on them anyway, which is pretty funny, but they run well so we're happy about it.

    And don't worry about the questions, watching slashdot is part of my job and I'll answer whatever I can.

    And as far as my job description goes, It's been changed to , get this, "Linux Community Evangelist". Which means, um, well, whatever I like :-)

    Chris DiBona
    VA Linux Systems
    --
    Grant Chair, Linux Int.
    VP, SVLUG

    --
    Co-Editor, Open Sources
    Open Source Program Manager, Google, Inc.