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TurboLinux Gets $50M Capital 44

Posted by CmdrTaco from the whole-lotta-dough dept.
An anonymous reader pointed us to a CNet article that talks about Turbo Linux getting $50M in capital from a variety of investors including Dell, Compaq and others. Also talks about Caldera and Linuxcare and the whole Linux Market right now.
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TurboLinux Gets $50M Capital More

TurboLinux Gets $50M Capital

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  • Re:Proprietary? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    They have this high availability distributed web server software. The transactions are spread among many identical computers so that if any one system fails, the others can pick up the slack.
  • Maybe with something like a source-exchange deal in place on a per-distro basis, we could take advantage of funded distro's that don't seem to be the next ms...

    Don't get me wrong, I think RH is a good distro, thou I perfer debian myself. Mostly because of apt-get. :) But let's look at both sides of the coin here:

    1) A bit of funding, to help excourage people to get a new "stable" debian out faster. :)

    2) We need at least one debian distro, something we can trust to be "uncontaminated" be monitary interests.

    I know, those last two are a 180 from each other. But it's early, and i need coffee or something.

    Btw, to Rube: good comment. Post this kinda stuff under a account so more people see it..


    bash: ispell: command not found

  • SCO (Score:1)

    by Simon ( 815 )
    Didn't I see SCO on that list? Now, unless I'm going nuts they produce SCO Unix which is under attack from Linux.

    What are SCO up to? What's their little plan?

    --
    Simon
  • I truly hope that was flamebait...otherwise, I personally have no idea what you're talking about. If it's:

    a.) a personal website
    then you're a crack-smoking loser who
    can't read (it's a link on the left...
    the seventh link down)

    but if it's
    b.) the constant plea for source code
    then it's at (I think)
    http://slashdot.org/code.shtml
    or you can click on the link that's on the
    left side of the page (just between
    FAQ and awards.)
  • Being a Mandrake user, I have to say that it's really easy (IMHO I think it's easier than SuSE, which is quite an accomplishment. :^) Mandrake essentially takes an already good product (Red Hat Linux) and beefs it up a bit with improvements like better KDE integration, and adds such things as experimental X servers and kernel modules. The new Mandrake distro (7.0; haven't tried it yet) is supposed to have point-and-click hardware config, and includes such niceties as Supermount pre-configured. Very slick. :^)

    I recently tried TurboLinux...bleck. I use Linux as a desktop OS, and, quite frankly, Mandrake required little setting up to get it working the way I wanted to.

    That's interesting, the comment you made about the soundcard. SuSE ships soundcard modules now?? The last time I tried SuSE, they shipped with the shareware OSS drivers, and recommended either a kernel compile (a good idea, IMHO) or to simply buy the OSS driver (at the time, it was just about the only option for my soundcard anyway. :^) It may be time to try SuSE again... :^)
  • Okay, I'm wondering...

    What does Free Slash refer to? If it's referring to moderation, if you sign up, you can set your own personal moderation to a level where you can read all the comments about Natalie Portman's granite butt you want, or you can set it higher to get rid of the crap. In other words, if you sign up, you have the *freedom* to rid yourself of the crap.

    If you're referring to the sourcecode, scroll up to the top of the page, and look at the list of links. The first link is marked "faq", and the second is marked "code." If you can't figure out what that could possibly be, click on it. If you're still bewildered, please reformat your Linux partition and run windows. Or, sell your computer and get an iMac. Better yet, become a Luddite.

    If you don't like the policy of having to put a Slashdot logo on a site running Slash, remember that Linux systems use mostly GNU software, or at least software released under the GNU Public License (GPL.) GPLed software is not free.

    "Huh?" I hear you say. It's true. Once software is released under the GPL, there's no turning back. The license agreement cannot be changed. If you make changes to the code, those changes must be made available to the general public. In short, you don't have the freedom to close your source if you wish to. The BSD license is, I think, a more sensible alternative.
  • ...where's my(our) glibc2.1 based distro? I'd really like to try out the recent builds of Mozilla and Opera, but.... ;)

    MoNsTeR
  • We keep a small portion closed simply so that we have *something* that is ours.

    Why do you find this necessary, Justin? Is it:
    • So the capital markets have some 'IP' to include in their valuations?
    • That your kernel mods et al are useless without the closed daemon, so the value of all your code is maintained internally anyway?
    • Something else?

    Do you think this is something that other companies relying on open source products will have to do too, or is it something that is specific to clustering products?
  • TurboLinux isn't hurting anyone except for TurboLinux by keeping their source code under lock and key although you'd kind of hope that a company so dependant on free software would at least understand that basic tenets of the free software philisophy and embrace it fully rather than do this "we'll open it up as soon as we think we can't make money off of it anymore" thing.

    Only time will tell if closed source is the only way a software company can make money or not.

    Let me play devil's advocate for a minute here (to encourage discussion, not flame!)...

    Many companies like open source because they get free (beer) software and source code, not because they like giving it back to the community. Let's hypothesise (and I'm not saying that this is the case) that TurboLinux falls under this banner. Couldn't they adapt their proprietary product to rapidly changing customer demands through combining the best of open source with their own unique (and proprietary) insights?

    Of course, they couldn't use GPL code per se, but I think most coders would agree the difficulty is in the design, structure, and ideas, not the code itself.

    I want to see Open Source succeed as much as the next Slashdot reader. Help me believe! Saying 'only time will tell' is a cop out--we need to make our best guess now. If software companies can't make money without closed source, that's a lot of missed opportunities for open source development.
  • Your comments are, very seriously, drivel.
  • Hey MoNsTeR : We've got v6.0 coming soon with Glibc2.1 and lots of other cool stuff - Expect it within a month or so.
  • Enahs (and anyone else) : We're always trying to improve our products according to user suggestions - could you let us know what you didn't like about it? (preferably in an e-mail to me, rather than a /. post)

    I would expect our upcoming v6.0 to be more mature for desktop use (we've tossed the old AfterStep and are using GNOME and KDE as our recommended desktops)


  • Unfortunately, I didn't catch this when it was fresh, but i thought I would put some useful info out there in case someone was browsing old posts.


    First of all, I'd like to say that I'm not 100% informed on our decision not to completely open the source because I haven't been involved in any of the recent discussions. I want to answer your questions because they're good questions and I expected them (I just forgot to come back and check for responses to my posts).


    My original post was based on what I knew from meetings we had in June and July. It has been some time, and I'm a bit out of the loop sometimes, being a telecommuter - TurboCluster hasn't really been related to my job lately. I found out that our policy is "to release the daemon source code six months after general availability of each product revision". For instance, we released TurboCluster Server in mid-November, and plan to release the daemon source in mid-May.



    Why do you find this necessary, Justin? Is it:


    So the capital markets have some 'IP' to include in their valuations?



    I'd have to lean towards no, but because I don't really know the details of the final decision (I wasn't present) I'm not going to waste time speculating.




    That your kernel mods et al are useless without the closed daemon, so the value of all your code is maintained internally anyway?


    This is definitely not the reason. Our kernel mods include ip tunneling and other changes to the networking code - some of which are not useful outside of a cluster, but could be useful with other clustering solutions. Early on in the project, our product was very close to the Linux Virtual Server project, and we contributed a *lot* of code to them, in fact I beleive we did most of the work necessary to get it working with the 2.2 kernel. The version that we eventually released as TurboCluster 4.0 was probably the third version that we created. The code that we have closed is a fairly minimal portion that deals mostly, as I understand it, with the failover capabilities of TCS.


    Something else?


    Probably :)


    Do you think this is something that other companies relying on open source products will have to do too, or is it something that is specific to clustering products?


    I think it is something that doesn't necessarily *have* to be done, but that was probably a good idea in this case. We essentially didn't want anyone to be able to take our product and sell it as our own. They could probably reverse-engineer it and rewrite the code if they wanted, but there isn't much we can do about that. We simply want to be doing *some* innovation in house that gives us a marketable product. This is how I understand it, and why I personally think we decided to go the way we did. We made our decision with the community in mind - but with the goal of making money from the work we did.


    I understand why members of the community would be unhappy with our decision, and I understand that it was not the only way to do it - but it is how we did it, and any other way would have surely been imperfect and caused some people to be unhappy with us. We can't please everyone, but we try.


    Thanks for your comments - and I apologize for sounding like someone out of the marketing department. I just wanted to be sure to be clear about what I said so it couldn't be taken the wrong way.


    Justin Ryan (TurboLinux)

  • This is really late but I'm putting it out for history's sake, and because I'm kinda bored :) I don't know exactly why we skipped to 6.0, but it may have something to do with the fact that most (non-linux-using) people refer to Red Hat as Linux. It *is* Linux as far as they know. They may say 'I have Linux 6.0', not quite understanding the fairly new concept of several different companies marketing a product that is essentially the same - but has very different versioning schemes. They would say 'This is TurboLinux, it is 5.0, it is older' and so purely based on a misconception, may purchase Red Hat (or another distro who's versioning is higher than ours). We don't want that, and I don't think our customers want that, because it's just confusing. It would probably be a lot easier to explain if all the distros used versioning based on the kernel version (with a sub-version or something, i.e. 2.2.12-TL4), but it would look ugly and would require a lot of work and cooperation between distros :). We also have products in Japan and China that have been releasing quicker than our English products, so we may have needed to catch up with them in versioning and be a bit more synced up.
  • Yeah? Would you perhaps consider sharing your amazing software with the rest of us? I'd sure be interested and if I thought it was worthwhile, I'd help you in your campaign.

    -----------

    "You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."

  • Asian (Score:1)

    by Foogle ( 35117 )
    Is TurboLinux still the most popular Linux distro in the Asian market? If so this would be a clear attempt by Dell and others to make sure they don't lose customers to existing Linux vendors.

    -----------

    "You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."

  • TurboLinux sells Linux augmented with its own software, a proprietary product [...]

    What proprietary (I understand non free) software is delivered with TurboLinux?

  • He's talking about the AC, not Rob, in his post.
  • Some of them (Dell and Compaq come to mind), are tired of being married to MSFT's software base and want an alternative available. Back when OS/2 still had (consumer market) wind, you had companies blindly tossing money at that, too, because it seemed to be a viable x86 alternative. Now that linux is hyped moving more towards the mainstream (not to mention dozens of companies are developing for it and not one Blue(tm) One), the benefits they'll pull are of being able to jumpship if mainstream customers start demanding an alternative to Windows...
  • So, Novell has first invested in RedHat, then (last week) in Caldera and now in TurboLinux.
    And if they really release their NDS tools under the NCL, who says Novell isn't becoming a Linux company?

    But then, again, with DigitalMe, NDS eDirectory, NDS Corporate Edition and the aquisition of JustOn, they might as well become an internet company.

    Or, maybe any Linux company is also an Internet company.





  • Suse6.3 with YaST2 is probably the most impressive installer and distro combination I have yet to see. I use it all the time when helping friends convert. IIRC Mandrake 7 is also supposed to have a real nice installer too.

    Also FYI, Suse6.3 even supported my soundcard (Live! Value) out of box, I didn't even need to compile new drivers. The breadth of hw support is incredible.

  • Well I just thought of how much money the linux-distros have been getting lately. I estimate it to the >> 1 billion dollars. If that money is used to make better scalability, more userfriendly and good hardWare support.

    With all that money coming around We (the community) would have the opportunity to make that happen. And if we got the 20 % of the servermarket, and 10 % of the software market nothing could stop us

    Shit happens just gotta learn to live with it>/P>

  • but I'm still waiting for companies to sink more money into hardware support for the linux kernel and better, more intuitive GUI interfaces and installers. If the same level of money and support was poured into making linux a truly viable desktop solution for the computer novice, all of the distributions would be able to gain a stronger foothold in peoples homes and on user's desktops. I see this as a great place to lead off from, but lets ont let the desktop application go by the wayside. On an offtopic note, is there a distribution out there with a truly easy to use installer and a wide variety of 'built in' hardware support? I've been using RH almost exclusively, and, although I could get it running, I doubt I'd be able to say the same about even a mildly less technically able person, let alone a novice.
  • We still seem to be doing well in Asia - I'm not very involved with our Asian products, but I hear good news pretty often - and we did outsell several Microsoft products (retail sales, not OEM) for ~3 weeks this summer in Japan.
  • Try Corel Linux. It's easier to install than Windows. On the other hand, no one installs Windows (at least not non-technical folk). The pre-install market will be where most of the Linux sales come from over the next few years. This is why a strategic investment from this sort of company is so important!
  • Depending on the level of investment, they get:

    • Dividends if/when the company is profitable
    • Possibly a seat on the board, but at least some level of input into the way the company is run
    • A closer tie to the company (this is often how companies assure eachother that their dealings will be on the level, sometimes it even works).
    • A stake in an IPO
    • It makes it easier (and cheaper) to perform a buyout later.

  • Once software is released under the GPL, there's no turning back. The license agreement cannot be changed.

    Bzzzt!

    No license agreement can be changed by the license holder (after the product is released) unless the license specifically provides a mechanism for such, and I would debate the legality of such a clause.

    On the other hand, I can change the licensing on my GPLed software any time I want. Watch, I'll just nip over to my src directory and replace fubarproject/COPYING with a file that reads "This software has been placed in the public domain. All copyright to it has been reliquished by the author". Hm.... nope, don't like that. I'll change it to "This software is released under the same terms as your mother. Please ask her for details"

    The point is that the COPYRIGHT HOLDER can always modify the terms of the licensing for future releases. NO ONE can modify the terms for previous releases (e.g. you can non un-public domain something once you've released it, nor can you un-BSD something, nor un-MIT it, etc). The lincensee may have the right to impose more restricitons (e.g. with the MIT or BSD licenses), but that's a different topic entirely.

    Please study up before you post.

    Would someone please moderate this thread down. I would like people who see the previous post to see this, but I really don't think either are on-topic for the article.

    Thanks.
  • So what's in this deal for the investors? Do they own a part of the company now, or are they doing it just for the publicity? But then, if there are over a dozen of them, a single company's share of the publicity isn't very big ...

    The article says "The reason for the investments are simple, ... companies see a new market opening up with the arrival of Linux, and they want to ensure themselves a foothold" - but the investing companies are not the only onw that profit. I just don't understand this from the point of view of the investors ...
  • Didn't Caldera just get some money from some of these same companies? I thought I saw SCO on both lists. I wonder what the deal is. The bottom line is that Red Hat, Caldera, TurboLinux, S.u.S.e., Madrakesoft and others are competitors. They are selling packing and support for Linux. Yes, they do cooperate on standardizing the important aspects so that various Linux systems are compatible, but there's a limit to that, and a sale for one is often a missed opportunity for the others.

    So I can think of a couple possible reasons to invest is more than one. One is simply hedging bets. If one of them ends up the only real player, you want to own a piece of that company. Another would be a proxy war. Give them all money, keep them all playing and make sure none of them dominates the others. I have trouble believing that that is a viable strategy.

    Does anyone have any different ideas?

  • I agree that Linux is not that easy for the end consumer, but Linux has gotten to the point that it makes more sence on the server side of things. This fact only recently struck me as I was configuring some stuff on Solaris and Linux.

    Basically it come down to this: the UNIX platforms are getting the new technology sooner than Win32 on the server side. The Apache site states their Win32 offering is not as good as their UNIX offering. This is significant because Apache gets the addons way sooner than IIS. JServ, php, JSP, etc. There are just more new technologies on Linux servers than on Win32 servers. And with Samba, you don't really need WinNT Server (except maybe for Exchange, though I don't know much about what Exchange Server does beyond the email. Does it handle the appointment stuff, etc? Can all the functionality be replaced with zmail and a newserver?).

    It for this reason that I think this investment is fairly sound (at least for Dell who has large server revenues, and Compaq who is trying to move [or have they succeeded yet] into the server market).

  • Companies seem to be putting a good amount of money into linux lately. While I think it's a much better OS than Windows, it's not as easy to learn as windows is. Computer companies hopefully know this and also realize that its going to be difficult to get people to switch to Linux, and even moreso without plenty of support.

    Even for a free OS, I'm sure there are plenty of people who, unfortunately, will think that adaptation is more expensive than the exorbirant pricetags on the different flavors of Windows. However, I'm also very pessimistic when it comes to the intelligence of humanity in as a whole, so theres always a possibility that im wrong.

    Zack Adgie
    ---------------------------
    A wise man speaks because he has something to say.
    A foolish man speaks because he has to say something.

  • Re:Proprietary? (Score:4)

    by TurboJustin ( 34296 ) on Saturday January 15, 2000 @08:43AM (#1368958) Homepage
    To be a little more specific - the *only* proprietary part of our Clustering software is a little daemon that runs on the routers/load balancers. You can have as many cluster members as you'd like that aren't running TurboCluster (TurboLinux Server, another distro, even another OS). If I'm not mistaken, we sell a 2-node license and an unlimited node license - many people need only two load balancers, others need more. The admin tools are open-source, the kernel modifications are open-source, etc..

    I just wanted to post this before there is some confusion about it - because there always is. We keep a small portion closed simply so that we have *something* that is ours. We do, however, provide the source to an older version of TurboCluster - completely.

    Justin Ryan (TurboLinux)

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