“There was some barely disguised meerschaum in some quarters of
the Valley after TurboLinux announced lay-offs: reportedly ten per
cent of the company’s workforce.”
“The layoffs “were significant enough to affect profitability
and shallow enough that we can focus on what we do best”, according
to TurboLinux president Paul Thomas, who identified these as
clustering and Japanese language versions of Linux, according to
G2.”
“…So why the uncharitable comments and ill-will? Much of
that is generated by TurboLinux’s take on the open source model,
which has involved a combination of time-delay source release and
its own proprietary features. Despite the outrage, the latter
is actually pretty harmless – for example management GUIs are
released only as binaries, not as source – and gives the company
some time to market advantage but doesn’t really preclude smarter
alternatives. But the rather grudging time-delay ploy has led to
several high profile accusations that TurboLinux is playing by the
rules rather than spirit of the game. That developers don’t like it
is one thing, but open source developers tend to need code fast,
with the result that TurboCluster Server has become increasingly
marginalised.”