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Intel Invests in TurboLinux
OUSpirit writes "I saw this over at Netscape's Technews site. Evidently, Intel (and some other companies) just invested some major bucks in TurboLinux to put them on more equal footing with RedHat. They plan to use the money to expand management and development staff.
"
Isn't Debian non-profit? You can't invest in a non-profit organization - only donate them money.
God does not play dice - Einstein
Not only does God play dice, he sometimes throws them where they
What else would you expect out of Intel?
There's rampant worry about the ability of MS to
produce a working 64-bit windows, and while the
IA32 has served intell well for some time, the
wave of the future is 64 bit. The best way to
ensure the availability of working OSes is to
fund their production.
Plus, there's that all-your-eggs-in-one-basket
thing.
- Reason #1: They don't have a stranglehold on the market
- Reason #2: Most of their employees aren't millionares
Anyone want to add a few more?-----------------------------------------------
my blog: good times, man, good times
They say they want to add proprietary software into their distro. I don't know if I like the sound of that. I guess it really depends how they do it, but in theory they can create a distro that's dysfunctional without a couple of proprietary components of theirs, and then say "well, sure, you can download all the GPL'd stuff from our site - it just won't work."
It's more likely that they're refering to adding stuff like word perfect. In that case it's ok, redhat does the same, but redhat's commitment to GPL the stuff they write makes me a lot more comfortable.
God does not play dice - Einstein
Not only does God play dice, he sometimes throws them where they
Didn't Intel a make a major investment in RedHat in the not-so-distant past? (About a year ago IIRC) Now that they've invested in TurboLinux as well, I wonder if they think Linux may eventually be a desktop contender? These investments are what will make it happen.
Anyway, the more the merrier I think. Competition between big Linux distributions can only make the distributions better, which will in turn make Linux better, and more accessable to the masses. Many of the companies also contribute developers full time to Open Source projects as well, which is a really good thing,because most people can't afford to quit their day jobs to write free code, as much as they'd like to.
TurboLinux is HUGE in Asia - It's currently outselling Windows there.
It has a great install process as well, I think better than RedHat 6.0 (I can't comment on 6.1). Automatic NIC config, Video card detection and config, etc.. during the install process.
I think you can take Intel's statement at face value - they want Linux to run best on Intel processors. Thus Linux users will buy Intel boxen and make Intel happy. It also allows them to control their fate a bit - not totally relaint on the EVIL EMPIRE for an OS.
This could actually be a major test of the commercial viability of open-source. There are a number of Linux distributions out there, a number of them moneymaking ventures to one extent or another, but Red Hat has been, until now, the only company to really build a business model on a corporate scale around Linux. If this investement really grows Turbo Linux into a full-scale, commercial Linux corporation, this will be a chance to observe two large-scale corporations competing to sell Linux as their core product in the same market (N. America).
The OSS naysayers have been insisting that a company cannot survive in a competitive market space by giving away their core product, and all of their R&D. This is exactly what Red Hat has been doing, and hopefully Turbo Linux will follow suit. Will they chicken out and go proprietary (with non-OSS add-ons and such)? Will one of them crush the other? Or can they really both prosper? Only time will tell. The future of corporate open-source could be at stake.
This is a smart move on Intel's part. They've been not-so-subtly tugging at Microsoft's leash, and this investment has the potential to drive up Linux's acceptance (nothing like a little competition to make Red Hat and Turbo work hard for customers). Furthermore, it gives Intel a chance to test the strength of the OSS model, and see whether they can count on it to rescue them from their death-embrace with MS.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" -Salvor Hardin
The main thing that I pulled from this article is that Intel wants to sell Linux, but with some proprietary software on it. What will this lead to? Many different distributions, all with different commands, different functionality, different user interfaces?
I really don't want to go around naysaying and predicting the fall of Linux, but I think the last thing Linux needs is the kind of fracturing within itself that is similar to what happened to UNIX. With so many distributions, some proprietary, some not, it's going to start to confuse and frustrate consumers. "I have Linux at home, but when I use it at work it has none of the things I usually use at home."
The solution? I don't know. Try to keep up with Intel features in open source? That may be difficult, and not feasible when other compnies do this. Suggestions?
Or maybe it all means nothing. JALD.
-no broken link
Someone already stated that, for Japanese and Chinese Market. Turbo-Linux is the market leader in Japan and Mainland China.
Non-MS product is quite acceptable in Japan Market. Such as Mac and OS/2 still survive in Japan.
Now, to start off, I am NOT one of the "Red Hat is the Microsoft of Linux" people.
Ok, having said that, I'm guessing that Intel is fed up with a monopoly over the current OS of choice for their processors, and wants to make sure that it doesn't happen again.
So, despite the anti-monopolistic protections that the GPL provides, they may feel that it makes sense to have SEVERAL strong Linux distributions rather than just one. That way they won't be tied to one OS vendor the way they have been in the past.
Excellent. Maybe this will help curb the "Redhat is going to take over the market and become the next Microsoft!!!!" hysteria amongst the slashdot readership. It's also a somewhat unusual move - maybe Intel is hedging it's bets. Kinda agrees with the idea that Redhat != Linux. Or maybe Intel believes that different distributions have different customers, and want to appeal to the broadest possible market.
--
I thought Intel already was. They want support for IA64, and egcs is getting it. They also were working at one point to add in Intel's SIMDs instructions (mmx (and?) Katami). AMD should put some cash into optimizing egcs, etc. for the Athlon and x86-64, since optimization makes a huge performance gain under Linux.
Now.. if Intel would also invest evenly, not just Linux and BeOS (are they still?), that would be nice. Intel - any support for the BSD guys too?
"Open Source?" - Press any key to continue
Will Intel finaly take the gloves of with M$ and show them that the world does not revolve around Redmond?
Both Microsoft and Intel hate the concept of "wintel", even though Microsoft is 99% dependant on Intel systems and Intel is 90% dependant on Microsoft systems.
Another thing they both have in common is the lust for the high profit datacenter market owned by IBM, Sun, and HP. The difference is, since Microsoft dropped Alpha, they are totally dependant on Intel to get them there. (Not that NT-on-Alpha was selling well, which may also will be the case for NT-on-I64.) Intel, on the other hand, looks to be betting heavily on Unix to sell the super-high-margin systems.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
A good guess as to why Intel is investing in linux can be seen in the painful extension of the x86 architecture long after it should have died a quiet death. Really, folks, it's 20 years old, and there are far better ways to do things (witness Power PC vs x86 benchmarks) than to keep compatibility with the same old opcodes.
The _only_ reason that x86 survives is backward compatibility with *DOS*. With Linux, and other OSes like it, it's much *easier* to port the old OS to the new processor than it is to build a processor that is backward compatible. Note that Linux _already_ runs in the Merced simulator (or whatever they're calling it these days) and Win2k *doesnt*.
Micro~1 has had a vested interest in bullying Intel into keeping the x86 architecture, since they're experts at writing assembler and not at writing portable operating systems. However, Linux presents a way out of this trap, and _that_ is why Intel likes Linux.
According to this news report, Intel has been working with Cygnus to provide support for MMX and PIII SSE instructions in order to improve x86 linux application performance.
Say what?
Somebody better inform the shareholders of all of those companies that have donated money to the FSF down through the years...
I'd sure like to see the shareholders suit prove that donating money to an organization that is producing tools to help develop your target market is a breach of fudiciary responsibility (the usual shareholder suit). You could also pretty easily argue that a donation to Debian is just to develop good will. If shareholders could sue over donations to non-profits, we'd sure see a lot less corporate philanthropy.
I think Intel has recognized that the current Linux offerings can pretty well be deployed on current hardware or AMD processors. There may be some advantage to running on the latest, hottest processor, but not much.
With bloatware, Intel could count on people starving for the fastest that Intel could provide. The new marketplace will have people upgrading far less often, and more often they'll be looking at better I/O throughput (SCSI disks - several to balance workload, better networking, faster bus speeds) rather than higher processor power. Bloatware (CERTAINLY Win95/95, this is probably less true of NT) isn't very good at taking advantage of lots of concurrent I/O anyway, so people just don't go for all these I/O throughput upgrades now. They just buy the latest processor in the vain hope that it can keep up.
Intell sees that they'll be looking at a slump in their bread-and-butter processor sales if something doesn't happen.
Their only hope is to try and get Linux vendors in hot feature competition in the hopes that all this new functionality will lead to the bloatware heaven that they've enjoyed in the last 5 years.
interesting chain of events..
./configure;make all. Is Intel trying to destroy the hardware independance of Linux by promoting things which will tether it to a limited number of processors? Is the shadowy and much-feared Covert Ops arm of Intel planning on replacing the Turbolinux management with evil androids which will slavishly refuse to support any non-intel microchips well?
1.IBM comes to dominate the computer world.
2.Microsoft works itself into a position where people buying IBM products are heavily directed toward Microsoft DOS.
3.Microsoft works itself into a position where it is independant of IBM.
4.Microsoft comes to dominate the computer world.
5.IBM ceases to be of any importance and collapses in a mess of antitrust lawsuits. It never really goes back into the consumer market.
6.Intel works itself into a position where people buying Microsoft products are heavily directed toward the x86 architecture.
((YOU ARE HERE))
7.Intel works itself into a position where it is independant of Microsoft
Do you see a pattern? Can you guess step 8? Of course, this is probably looking at things the wrong way, and exaggerating things a lot, and assuming that Intel really can work itself into a position where when microsoft falls Intel won't come crashing down with it (which is not _that_ likely). But still, it's awful suspicious.
If i wanted to be even MORE paranoid, i'd refer to the other postings here stating that TurboLinux is thinking about putting propeitary stuff in their distro; the way i look at it, that sounds an awful lot like closed-source and-- as a result-- not quite as hardware-independant, since mr. end user can't just
Who knows? Certainly not me. But the truth is out there. The truth is out there..
[if you wish, you may insert in this space a random and uninformed flamebait about integrating support for PPC and Alpha machines into the main linux kernel tree]
-mcc-baka
(this post was originally written with Mozilla M10 for macintosh. Its form support lacks many things, for instance full support for the left arrow key. After clicking "preview" i discovered that Mozilla M10 randomly deletes about half of what you put into any form you try to send. I had to retype it in a more finished browser. Hey; it's beta.)
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
1: Intel likes Linux: Meaning they want to see it thrive.
2: Intel wants to keep AMD et al out: Meaning their investments will make distros optimize for Intel (maybe only...) keeping AMD especially in a hard place.
3: Intel wants independency: Intel sees linux as the next top OS, wants to be sure they're not locked into Microsoft.
4: Intel likes throwing money at people who look neat: Hey, not such a far feched idea.
Eitherway I think it is good business practice... though AMD might think differently.
--onyx--
Regardless of your aim for humor, I think that #6 is an actual reason that competitor to Linux (ie Microsoft) can point to as a valid issue...
:)
I don't mind learning new CLI's and GUI's, but that's because I have the will to do it in my spare time. No corp want to retrain all their employees simply to save the $50-$90 per machine that windows costs them, and not many employees are going to volunteer to stay late for a couple weeks just so they can learn to do what they already know how to do...
KDE and/or GNOME have to be a better "Windows" than Windows for Linux to catch hold of the desktop... I may be getting a little off topic, so i'll stop here.
Turbo Linux (Japanese), through my sad personal experience.
I am not GPL zealot but I think they should be a little bit kind to GPL community since they are benefited from GPL in many ways.
If you down load their "#1 status" Japanese version of TL distribution from their ftp, you will be comfortably surprised how fast their ftp servers are. (Reality: very few even bother to download because cheap high speed connection is still rare thing for most Japanese thanks to its stupid government and monopoly telephone company.) Good start for me. But when installation starts, I was annoyed to find out their distribution has intentionally broken X-system.
Their excuse is True type fonts they use are commercial software and thus excluded from FTP version. Japanese use over 1000 character fonts. Creating new font system is not trivial. So this excuse may sound OK. But Debian already has free true type included so they do not resort to be like this blatant broken distribution just to get by GPL. It looks like they do this just to charge for the software (over $100 per copy), important of which they get free from GPL/BSD community. Another concern I have is that it is practically impossible to copy and share this distribution due to tangled copyright position of each software components. With good money made with expensive distribution without even an installation support in the old days, they could have donated Japanese free true type font.
Whatever the wording in GPL/BSD, spirit is community. Being a member of community, they can not take-take. It has to be give-and-take. If they want to combine commercial software to Linux distribution, I ask them to do it kindly and nicely. I think similar type of consideration must be made by Corel people. If any Linux distributor makes enhancement to core part of distribution, they have to give back to community. If these are not done, GPL community may have to resort to introduce new restrictive rules on distribution.
Last note: my personal experience of old TL 2.0 Pro was miserable. No installation support and priced over $100. True type font and simple word processor was the only significant commercial software bundled. I decided never to purchase CD from them.
I ran the 3.0 distribution for about 2 months, almost a year ago... (has it been that long??)
:> Can't beat it.
At any rate... It's actually a very nice distribution....
Installs easily... is very well configured, etc. etc.
My problem arose in that it's geared for folks that don't
know beans about Linux.
I'm competent enough with Linux that I like to configure it
the way _I_ want it... but I wasn't competent enough
to install a large number of packages and services
due to my inability to re-configure all of their
custom scripts. *shrug*
Tech support was great though
E-mail response in a few hours (if not minutes) and
their own newsgroup as well (not tooo heavily poupulated either)
Personally I don't have anything against Intel for
investing in TurboLinux.... I'm not interested in
either of their products anymore....
Not intel for a few years... and not TurboLinux for the
above reasons... *shrug*
To each their own, though.
Friends don't let friends buy Compaq's. (Dell/Gateway... same same) You want a good computer? Build it yourself.