VA Linux: The biggest dotcom IPO

Comments

Comment by twoodfin 4 hours ago

Especially strange and relevant here: VA Linux owned Slashdot. Depending on whether you were a Digg person—I was not—Slashdot is either hn’s conceptual grandfather or great-grandfather.

“News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters.”

Comment by cowsandmilk 3 hours ago

What do you view as the generations between Slashdot/Digg and HN?

Comment by heelix 2 hours ago

Likely reddit

Many folks left Dig for their primary feed when they did the UI update. I think I switched over to Slashdot around that time. The multi selector for karma, on the comments and them changing usernames so my original no longer worked drove me to reddit as that prime feed for me, for about 10 or so years.

As reddit exploded... that main home switched to here. Not quite that same sense of community and always a grab bag of subject, so much closer to Digg/Slashdot feel. I never ended up doing facebook or some of the other social media sites. As reddit tried/tried to become that sort of space (with monetization!) it became something I was not looking for.

Comment by lizardking 2 hours ago

Comment by roryirvine 3 hours ago

The article mostly talks about VA's workstations, but I got the impression that their server line was just as important.

As I recall, they were one of the earliest vendors to produce a 1u server, which was a big potential selling point for them (Cobalt's RaQ was first, but initially used a MIPS R5000 variant with a crippled cache so gained a reputation for being a bit "weird").

Unfortunately, the bursting of the telecoms/networking bubble shortly after their IPO (and a year before the dotcom bubble imploded) flooded the market with 4u servers at fire-sale prices. Rack density wasn't nearly so important back then, so VA's neater kit suddenly appeared a whole lot less competitive.

Comment by styanax 2 hours ago

We had 2U VA Linux servers at a company (circa 2000), they were rock solid beasts which continued to run for years. I vaguely remember cannibalizing one chassis to beef up another / replace parts, but as you mentioned by then it was circa 2003 (?) and one could buy palettes of dotcom-bust servers off a dock in SF. A fully kitted HP DL380-G2 was around $100 IIRC, bought one it ran forever too - old Sun and SGI hardware as well, all of it. Dirt cheap, if you still had a job. :-/

Comment by wmf 9 hours ago

A fun tangent to this is ESR's "Surprised By Wealth" where he accidentally became paper rich off VA Linux stock but never made any real money due to the crash. https://lwn.net/1999/1216/a/esr-rich.html https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37708492

Comment by cheema33 8 hours ago

I am not going to shed a tear for ESR. He turned out to be a massive turd.

Comment by wmf 8 hours ago

ESR was always somewhat controversial. People trolled him at the time for what they saw as faux humility and virtue signaling.

Comment by mongol 5 hours ago

I recall this. But I didn't know he nevet made real money

Comment by justin66 2 hours ago

To make money he would have needed to sell his shares, and they became worthless before the post-IPO lockup period ended.

Comment by compsciphd 2 hours ago

they shouldn't have been.

From wikipedia

The company raised $132 million, offering shares at $30/share, but the shares opened for trading at $299/share, before closing at $239.25/share, or 698% above the IPO price, breaking a record for the largest first day gain.[7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14] Larry Augustin, the 38-year old founder and chief executive officer of the company, became a billionaire on paper and a 26-year old web developer at the company said she was worth $10 million on paper.[2] By August 2000, the shares were trading at $40 each[2] and only 24 mutual funds held the stock.[15] On December 8, 2000, one year later, after the bursting of the dot com bubble, shares traded at $8.49/share.[16]

per his essay he was given 150K shares. Even at the IPO price of $30 a share, that's 4.5 million. Do we not think the investment bank handling his shares would have been willing to take his whole stake at $30 a share?

But even if they wouldn't more than 6 months later it was still north of $40 a share (so $6mil or so) and even a year or so after the IPO, after the bubble popped, it was still north of $8 a share (so $1+mil).

Comment by Taniwha 6 hours ago

It's worth noting that before the dotcom bubble the rule of thumb was that a startup had to have 5 quarters of profit before going public - the whole dot-com thing of going public on vibes before making any profit was part of why it was a bubble, and also why investors were playing in a whole new sandpit and possibly out of their depth

Comment by vlovich123 5 hours ago

I’m not aware of any company that’s going public only after 5 quarters of profit for the past two and a half decades since the dotcom either.

Comment by mikestorrent 9 hours ago

Ahh, I'd totally forgotten they evolved into Sourceforge. A pity that they didn't pivot to Git hosting more quickly or they would have had a pretty good path to serious ROI for the enterprise.

Comment by zeruch 8 hours ago

They didn't evolve into SF; SF was a project inside of VA that eventually became the flagship of what remained after the hardware and related services were excised. When they started (1998/99), Git wasn't a viable option (the first version of it wasn't released until 2005, by which point SF had ballooned to an enormous scale at the time, with it's own product inertia, and it would be a few more years before Git would become a major VCS itself, which is when Github started, and by then VA/SF was in decline and had changed hands several times.

(disclosure: I was on the "Ignition team" for SF)

Comment by rwmj 2 hours ago

I'd love to know what the "thinking" was behind getting rid of the hardware business. We bought some Penguin Computing servers after VA left the market.

Comment by dizhn 4 hours ago

If I remember correctly they also provided free hosting to people. It was one of the only places where you could run a PHP site for free.

Comment by ErroneousBosh 3 hours ago

> it would be a few more years before Git would become a major VCS itself

People forget that in the olden days we used Subversion and Bazaar (well, the latter if you were Canonical-adjacent), and before that CVS.

And before that, SCCS.

Going back decades, it's all people going "this sucks, I'm writing my own VCS", and for whatever reason Git was the one that gained traction in that particularly sticky and slippery swamp.

Comment by qdotme 5 hours ago

TIL: Backstory of sourceforge! Brings back memories…

Comment by 0xbadcafebee 10 hours ago

> Today, it’s a little unusual for something you buy not to work with Linux

Err... no, it's definitely not unusual. I specifically spent a month looking for a laptop with Linux support just so I didn't have to go through the hell of unsupported hardware, and it's still not fully supported.

Comment by roryrjb 6 hours ago

If I install Ubuntu 25.10, I can't get camera effects (blurred background and so on) to work in Meet because hardware compositing (or something, I'm not entirely clear on the details[0][1]) doesn't work properly on the open Nvidia driver on Wayland. Wait I thought this was all supposed to be the future?

0. https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules/issues/644 1. https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/1due6ni/hardware...

Comment by p_l 6 hours ago

It's a recurring bug in chrome

Comment by gkhartman 10 hours ago

If you don't mind me asking, what did you end up buying, and what was lacking support? I'd expect full support from one of the "Linux first" suppliers like System76.

Comment by pcdoyle 9 hours ago

I just got a ThinkPad E14 Gen 6 and the only thing I had to fix/install manually was the driver for the fingerprint reader (fprintd). Everything else just worked, including my docking station and ultra wide monitor.

Comment by ghaff 3 hours ago

It helps to look for things that have some level of official backing. Dell has some models for Ubuntu and Red Hat uses various ThinkPads for employee Linux laptops. (Lot more Macs as well when I left but still plenty of ThinkPads that are overwhelmingly Linux.)

Comment by cabirum 6 hours ago

MIPI camera on my 3 year old Thinkpad still does not work

Comment by notadev 6 hours ago

Been running Fedora on Dell XPS 13 for a couple years with zero problems.

Comment by zpr515 6 hours ago

Same. And then I upgraded to the new Dell 14 Pro Premium, where webcam does not work (as for any IPU7 laptop for that matter). The rest is fine though, but still annoying.

Comment by billy99k 3 hours ago

I now just use Linux in the WSL. I get Linux with a superior GUI.

Comment by graemep 5 hours ago

Why did you just not buy a laptop from a supplier that preinstalled Linux?

Comment by Mountain_Skies 4 hours ago

Lots of things work out of the box, but yes, it's still far from being the default. Kensington is releasing an update to its Expert Mouse trackball. The MSRP looks to be USD$150, so not an inexpensive accessory. It supports Windows and Mac but has no Linux support. No doubt in time there will be community supported projects to give it functionality on Linux close to, but not entirely like, what it has on the other two OSes.

Comment by whatever1 10 hours ago

Not even high resolution screens work properly yet.

Wayland has done some progress, but still half of my applications look like sh when I use fractional scaling.

Linux is great if all you need is a terminal. Once you need a peripheral, then good luck, literally.

Comment by ghqqwwee 9 hours ago

There’s no OS that doesn’t have problems with wireless headsets in Teams. Bluetooth and sound stacks is a badly/barely working combination everywhere. Hibernation is usually the test that fails the sound stacks everywhere.

Comment by dahcryn 7 hours ago

literally 0 issues on my macbook

It has different issues, but wireless headsets nor hibernation are among them

Comment by ErroneousBosh 3 hours ago

> Linux is great if all you need is a terminal. Once you need a peripheral, then good luck, literally.

Just wait until you try this new Windows thing. Zero hardware support for anything.

Comment by ThePowerOfFuet 8 hours ago

>Wayland has done some progress, but still half of my applications look like sh when I use fractional scaling.

Do they look like shell, or like shit? You can use grownup words here.

Comment by cons0le 4 hours ago

This article provides NO explanation of what the "VA" in va linux is for. I guess I'm just stupid and everybody else knew right away

Comment by guenthert 4 hours ago

Well, it does list the names of the founders ...

Comment by deater 2 hours ago

way back in the day our college LUG (linux user group) had a rep from VA Linux come to speak, but the person running things was unfamiliar with the company and kept calling them "Virginia Linux"