Stories about: VA Linux Systems

Linux clustering vendor Mission Critical Linux last week laid off up to 90 percent of its workforce after attempts to find a buyer failed.

Discussing the topic of Web services, a panel of executives from open-source companies expressed a degree of confusion about Web services that is not uncommon in the industry.

The company known as VA Linux Systems Inc. officially dropped the Linux from its name on Tuesday, becoming VA Software Corp.

VA Linux Systems on Wednesday reported a US$55 million net loss for the first fiscal quarter of 2002, with revenue of $5.6 million. The loss, $1.04 per share, occurred largely because of restructuring charges and compares to a $51 million dollar net loss, or $1.12 a share, on revenue of $56 million in the same period a year ago.

In its first major effort to reinvent itself as a software company, VA Linux Systems Inc. Tuesday unveiled a new version of its collaborative software, SourceForge 3.0 Enterprise Edition, which allows companies to build communities for managing internal development projects.

There's more bad news for companies seeking to make a profit from the open-source Linux operating system, as an embedded operating system maker announces layoffs, and a supplier of Linux-based server hardware files for bankruptcy protection.

For some in the open source community, the forces of software development have come to resemble the age-old paradox of Yin and Yang, which states that light does not exist without dark and there is no good without evil.

Open-source software maker SuSE Linux AG has narrowly avoided insolvency after investors agreed to a new round of financing, according to a newspaper report. Backers will provide the struggling German company with 50 million euros (US$45.5 million) in fresh funding, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) said in its Thursday edition, citing unnamed industry sources.

The technology sector and the economy as a whole may be suffering through a slowdown, but here at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo there seems to remain an aura of untapped potential among vendors as they show off their Linux-based wares.

Drug maker Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc. has commissioned the construction of a 112-processor, 110-gigaflop Linux supercomputer cluster that will be used to accelerate drug research and development.

With its footprint in nearly every corner of the Internet and computing industry, the collaborative development model called open source that spawned Linux and the Apache Web server is on the ropes, criticized publicly by its foes as unworkable, weighed down by internal strife and bruised by a dragging economy.