| Linux companies that didn't deserve to die |
Jul. 26, 2007
A recent story entitled, "Dearly Departed: Companies and Products That Didn't Deserve to Die" didn't cover Linux or open-source companies. That got me to thinking. So here, without further adieu, is my list of five Linux companies that died before their time.
5) Cobalt Networks Way back in 2000, Sun purchased Cobalt Networks, a hotter than hot low-end server appliance company in a stock-for-stock deal worth about $2 billion. The Cobalt products used MIPS processors, which put them in direct competition with Sun's own UltraSPARC CPUs.
These were very nice Linux-powered mini-servers that were perfect for small and midsize businesses. They worked well and they were cheap to boot. Ed Zander (then Sun's president) said of Sun's Cobalt server line at the time: "We think the demand for these high-volume, turnkey devices will explode in the next couple of years. Cobalt is our bet for the future."
Fast forward three years to Cobalt Armageddon. In February 2004, Sun discontinued the last model in its Cobalt product line, the RaQ 550 server. Sun gave several explanations for the Cobalt's premature death, but the one they didn't give, and the one that I and many Linux supporters believe, is that Sun didn't want internal Linux competition for its low-end SPARC servers.
Before it closed Cobalt down, Sun open-sourced the Cobalt proprietary firmware and software. Because of this, the Cobalt servers died but the software lived on. Even today, under the name Blue Quartz, the Cobalt code lives on. The moral of the story: It's hard to keep a good Linux distribution down.
4) Progeny Linux Systems We all know there's almost nothing you can't do with Linux if you're willing to fool with the code. Wouldn't it be nice, though, if you were a business and you could just call up a company and say, "Hey, I want a Linux distribution that's customized for my specific needs?" I still think that's a great idea, and it's the one that Progeny Linux was built on.
Progeny was founded by Debian Linux creator Ian Murdock, who's now Sun's chief operating platforms officer. Its stock in trade was customizing Debian Linux distributions for businesses. It also had a nice little business supporting legacy versions of Red Hat—the pre RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) releases. Sounds like an easy way to make money from Linux doesn't it?
Nope.
So what happened? According to a report by Bruce Byfield, what killed Progeny wasn't a lack of business, it was the inability of the company to get the money it needed to scale up the business from 30 employees to one that was large enough to make the company stable.
Branden Robinson, former Debian project leader and a Progeny employee from the company's start, said that even when the company closed, it had half a dozen clients, and was in negotiations with at least one other company. In addition, Progeny continued to provide update services for three or four clients.
What Progeny didn't have was the resources it needed to hire the engineers it needed to keep its customers happy. Robinson said, "We pretty much had enough people that if we worked really, really hard, we could fulfill the contractual obligations that we had, but if we were to lose just one engineer, we'd be facing deadline slippage and other problems like that. It would have just sent us down the spiral in two or three months."
The lesson here is one that many failed technology companies have learned too late: Without solid financing, even the best business ideas can fail.
3) Linuxcare Like Progeny, Linuxcare started with a great idea: Provide businesses with a one-stop technical support center. In 1998, this was a breakthrough idea. Linuxcare founders Dave Sifry, Arthur Tyde and David LaDuke were, and still are, some of the brightest people I've met in open-source circles, and folks, that means they're really smart.
Unfortunately, the same can't be said of the management team they hired to run the company. In true dot com fashion, some of the executives couldn't have burned more money if they just tossed hundred dollars bills into a bonfire. In addition, there were back-office fights that would have been more appropriate for "The Sopranos" than a real business.
As I and my colleague Ben Elgin reported in 2000, the company charged head-on towards an IPO (initial public offering) and tripped along the way. The immediate result of that was the CEO and about a fifth of the staff were fired.
Then the real fun began. Former ETrade technology chief Douglas Nassaur was brought on board as CIO to create Sorcerer, a helpdesk and data coordination program, for all the support staff to use. However, he wanted to make it proprietary and, with many brilliant programmers on staff, he outsourced the work on the project for millions of dollars. The resulting internal fights were, in a word, ugly.
There were other personality conflicts on well, and, in the end, Linuxcare slowly sank out of existence. Some of the bits and pieces of the company came back together to form Levanta, a Linux-based data center management company. The founders went on to bigger, better and more successful projects. The core Linuxcare company died in what was easily the ugliest death from internal causes of any Linux company.
1 and 2: SCO and Caldera
What's that you say? SCO is still alive and, ok, not well, but still kicking? Yes, the company The SCO Group is still there, but it has become Linux's most active enemy, and the companies it was created from were murdered to create the Frankenstein monster we now know as SCO.
Before that though, SCO, until it bowed to the Linux's unstoppable rise and sold its Unix division to Caldera, was the company that kept the idea of desktop Unix/Linux alive. OK, so Open Deathtrap, I mean Open Desktop, was slow, but once Steve Jobs closed up NeXTStep for Intel and rejoined some company named Apple, SCO was the only company you could turn to for a Unix desktop on x86 that a non Unix or Linux expert could turn to.
True, Minix was the operating system that inspired Linus Torvalds to write Linux. But SCO's desktop and SCO's OpenServer on servers are the Unixes that kept the idea of Unix, and thus Linux, alive on x86 systems.
As for Caldera, some people didn't like that that it was treating Linux as a business—my how things have changed!—but Caldera Linux was great Linux. For many years, Caldera Linux was my favorite Linux both on servers and desktops.
Let's also not forget that while Ransom Love was in charge of Caldera's fate, he intended to take the best features of Unix and combine them with Linux. If the Canopy Group hadn't eased Love out and replaced him with Darl McBride, we'd be talking about SCO as the Linux company.
Ironic isn't it? In fighting Linux, SCO/Caldera was only successful in destroying each company's own past and its combined future.
—Steven J. Vaughan Nichols
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