Stormix

» see stormix.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Harbour Centre, Vancouver, February 1999. A web hosting company called NetNation spun out a subsidiary to do something nobody had quite made work yet, which was to sell Debian to buyers who had no intention of installing Debian themselves. The idea came from Kevin Lindsay. The money and the management came from David Talmor and Joseph Kibur. They called the company Stormix Technologies and the product Storm Linux.

Debian in 1999 had the best packaging system in the business and the worst front door. Installing it meant a text installer that assumed you already knew what was inside your machine. The alpha went out on 7 June 1999 and Storm Linux 2000 shipped on 15 December, with a graphical installer in front of all that and a set of configuration tools behind it. It went into retail boxes at $49.95 through a distributor called Frank Kasper & Associates, and that put it on the shelf at Fry's Electronics. For a Debian derivative in 1999 that was close to unheard of.

The first pressing was ten thousand copies and it was built from the wrong branch of the repository. By November 2000 the company put its own headcount at more than sixty people, spread across three offices as far out as Tokyo, and it took a booth to Comdex that fall with its servers racked up in it.

In Turkey the $49.95 never came up, because no shop here carried a Linux box on a shelf at any price. A distribution got to you as a CD glued to the cover of a magazine, or as an ISO you queued overnight and found abandoned at sixty percent in the morning. Storm Linux 2000 was a CD-sized problem on a 33.6k line. The graphical installer was the whole reason the product existed, and it was also the one part of it nobody here could judge from a review. A review was all that reached us.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what was on the shelf in 1999 ~

Stormix was not the only company with this idea, and the crowding is most of the story. Corel Linux went on sale at Comdex that November. Libranet was shipping out of Vancouver as well, a few kilometers away, run by a family that would keep going for another six years. Caldera and TurboLinux were already sitting on the same retail shelf. Every one of them was betting that the thing standing between desktop Linux and an ordinary buyer was the installer. The bet was not wrong. It was just much smaller than it looked.

A graphical installer earned you a customer once. What kept them was the software afterward, and in 1999 the office suite on offer could not reliably open the files anybody sent you. Storm Linux also shipped a personal firewall, and the company had rack-mount servers and a VPN appliance in development by the time the cash ran out. The business was drifting toward the back office while the box on the shelf still said desktop.

~ section 50.4(1) ~

On 8 January 2001 the Stormix homepage posted that Tucows had given Storm Linux five out of five penguins. It was the last thing the site ever posted.

Nine days later, on 17 January 2001, Stormix filed a Notice of Intention to Make a Proposal under section 50.4(1) of the Canadian Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act. The trustee was Deloitte & Touche Inc. in Vancouver. This is worth getting right, because every retelling calls it a bankruptcy. A notice of intention is filed with the Official Receiver rather than with a court, and it is the move a company makes when it wants a stay against its creditors while it tries to put a deal together. There is no court file number to look up. Stormix was asking for time. The news reached Slashdot and Linux.com on 27 January.

~ the first news item ~

The deal did not come together. On 25 April 2001 Stormix posted a notice saying it was going into hibernation, and the remaining staff were let go. The last release had gone out the previous December, a 2.06 update under the name Hail, and the four months since had been spent looking for somebody to fund the next one.

That notice is DistroWatch news item number 00001. Every distribution death DistroWatch has logged in the quarter century since sits in a numbered list that opens with this one, with a small Vancouver company telling people it was going to sleep. The notice ends "Long live the Open Source Movement, Linux and Debian." Bruce Byfield wrote the insider account years later for Linux Journal. stormix.com is 114 bytes today, and all of it is a redirect script.

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