TurboLinux completes $57m funding round

TurboLinux bosses will today find themselves on the receiving end of cheques totalling $57 million, the result of the company's latest round of pre-IPO funding. The staggering statistic here is not the size of the investment, but the fact that it comes from a total of 20 companies, and you begin to wonder whether its got to the stage where investing in a Linux operation is as much about getting a foot in the door ahead of all the ordinary punters come IPO day. Some of them are old hands at the 'pump money into Linux start ups' game -- you can include Intel, Dell, Compaq, Novell and the VC folks here -- so their presence is no great surprise. Others. TurboLinux's strength in the Chinese and Japanese markets explains the interest of the likes of Fujitsu Support and Service, NTT-ME Information Xing, Toshiba and Toyo Information Systems. It's interesting to note the presence of Citrix and SCO. TurboLinux's proprietary clustering tools make its version of the open source OS of particular interest to application server specialist Citrix, and may suggest a strategic shift away from Win2K -- Citrix server software has always been Windows-based, but the company is far from best of friends with the Beast of Redmond. Quite what SCO is up to seems unclear. It's spent the last 18 months or so running round trying to persuade anyone who will listen that its Unixware is a far superior solution to Linux, so its motivation here is purely financial, or it wants to get its hands of TurboLinux's clustering technology. ®