Your naivete is refreshing, but not particularly useful.
Your senators and house reps are the beneficiary of various forms of largesse from political donors.
"Billionaire ** and her *** ** *** are among the most prolific megadonors in modern American political history,
funneling hundreds of millions of dollars overwhelmingly to ***, ****"
please enumerate the civil wars over the decades Nix has been around. It is insane to discourage someone from using a good piece of battle-tested software because you personally have opinions about their community.
I can't think of an outcome that would be more odious to Steve Tuck and Brian Cantrill. Brian in particular still talks about the soul-crushing experience of Oracle's hostile takeover of Sun Microsystems.
Which many keep forgetting is that there was no one else wanting to acquire Sun, IBM did an offer that was shortly thereafter withdrawn, and that was it.
Sun would have died, everything completely lost among creditors and that would be it, end of story.
Ironically, not only are you entirely wrong on the facts themselves, but the historical record in this case is incredibly (and unusually) crisp: the Merger Proxy Statement that Sun had to file with the SEC[0] has, in accordance with Delaware law, the full narrative of the acquisition.
In the "Background of the Merger" section of that document, there is an incredibly detailed (and interesting!) story of three companies: Party A, Party B, and Oracle. (As was well-known at the time, Party A is IBM and Party B is HP.) As that narrative makes clear (and contrary to your assertion), it was Sun that rejected IBM's definitive agreement, not the other way around. You can certainly argue that IBM's acquisition of Sun would have failed to complete for other reasons (regulatory and so on) -- but your assertion that "IBM did an offer that was shortly thereafter withdrawn" is simply (and demonstrably) wrong.
Actual shout out to Oracle inexplicably moving Java forward a ton while also not strangling it with fees and suing their own customers. Wonder if there's a story of some genius, unsung internal salesman who made that happen.
Joyent was likely a part of what convinced Brian Cantrill that a new cloud machine was needed. They had their own stack running on commodity OEM hardware in their own cloud - likely a painful experience, since Brian talks a lot about how much of a difference it makes to own the complete root of trust and everything in it.
To answer these questions (or accusations?): Yes, I was at Joyent for the acquisition by Samsung -- but I also was not a founder, did not have a board seat, etc., so the involvement that I had, while substantial at some level (working with the Samsung team when they were doing their significant due diligence, for example) was also ultimately limited. My job was to make the acquisition work, not to determine the fate of the company for which I was ultimately an employee.
It's also absurd to call the sale a "sellout" -- the company was not for sale when Samsung came calling. The deal that Samsung proposed was a good and fair one, and if I HAD been on the board, I would have absolutely voted for the acquisition. (It should be said that Samsung themselves had a very high threshold to close the deal -- 97% of shares IIRC?)
And all of THAT said: while I was supportive of the acquisition by Samsung of Joyent (and worked hard to make that acquisition work), when we started Oxide, Steve and I had (and have!) zero interest in building a company to be acquired. Oxide is our life's work (and I mean that "our" broadly, as many at Oxide feel that same calling), and our objective with Oxide is to build an independent, generational company. Indeed, this Series D is all about advancing that objective!
I doubt that. Oxide was founded by a bunch of ex-Sun people who have already been burned by the Oracle acquisition. If you read through what they say, their company values, and how they act, it's pretty clear their intent is to grow a sustainable long-term business and they're not looking for an exit.
We are trying to build a sustainable long-term business! It's just that you need enormous amounts of money to get there when shipping this large a product.
The idea behind VC funding generally is that you need large infusions of capital to get to the point where the business becomes sustainable long-term. The first one is the most expensive, and so on. Hardware is capital-intensive compared to SaaS, and especially so in the current environment.
Read the blog post on their series C [0]. It's not long, but the most relevant excepts are:
> So if we didn’t need to raise, why seek the capital? Well, we weren’t seeking it, really. But our investors, seeing the business take off, were eager to support it. And we, in turn, were eager to have them: they were the ones, after all, who joined us in taking a real leap when it felt like there was a lot more risk on the table.
> ...
> Our intent in starting Oxide was not to be an acquisition target but rather build a generational company; this is our life’s work, not a means to an end. With our Series C, customers don’t have to merely take our word for it: we have the capital to assure our survival into the indefinite future.
Maybe you could read that and think its complete bullshit and they're lying their asses off. Considering the people behind Oxide and their history, that's vanishingly unlikely though.
The reasonable conclusion is that they would not have raised yet more money if it wasn't due to being offered very generous terms by investors who wouldn't threaten the long-term future of the business.
It says "they've entirely derisked capital" and now ~6 months later they raised twice as much. Lying is a strong word but that post clearly wasn't accurate at the time.
They've raised a lot of money and there will be pressure for an exit sooner rather than later.
You can be cashflow positive and still benefit from having a larger pool of cash to throw around, particularly in any situation involving hardware manufacturing.
If you tell your investors "our limiting factor is how fast we can spend to deliver on additional requirements for these new customers", then it can both be true that you're not going to miss payroll for 5 years no matter what happens tomorrow and more cash would be beneficial.
Look at how much the components cost 6 months ago and now. That may explain why some calculations shifted considerably. It may be an act of keeping up with the market and having some reserve.
Depends on the VC. Some VC's are happy to own great businesses, even long term. Most are definitely vultures after a quick turn around. Mostly it has to do with where the VC gets their funding. Most VC's get their funding from offering a fund with a 2-5 year time-frame. Some are 10 yr funds, and some are long-term funds or are funded by a family office or two, which can be happy with great businesses long term.
It makes sense for Broadcom to remove that avenue of escape, and it makes sense for Oxide's investors to charge a premium to Broadcom, and materialize their returns.
The customers will have to deal with it, of course. At least they bought physical systems instead of renting them, so they can use them until they're obsolete.
Is there anything they're doing that can't be replicated by hypervisor/management software on commodity x86 servers? Seems like their "secret sauce" is a software stack that "just works" more than any actual special feature of the hardware.
I feel like Broadcom with its VMWare acquisition could easily take these guys out if they wanted to (or for that matter, any OEM that has a line of servers + network & storage hardware). They don't, most likely because there isn't actually enough profit to be made there (Oxide having to raise money multiple times might be a hint).
Managing a single commodity device is pretty simple. Could even be a shell script with a few IPMI commands.
Managing 100s of devices from a mix of vendors is possible becomes itself a massive ball of crap to stick all the pieces together.
Then add firmware management because now there is a plethora of firmware updates to worry about.
And then dealing with networking discovery & orchestration for such setups is an added horror few even try to visualize.
Then abstract all these differences away so one can provision two different vendor’s servers connected to two different vendor’s managed switches in different racks to a new VLAN. And do it with SR-IOV while you’re at it…
Oh, I forgot shared storage… details, details…
Commodity computing is the modern day Tower of Babel.
Yes, it can be done much simpler if one treats all switches as unmanaged, all storage as local, and all networking as flat. That’s just not acceptable for a lot of use cases though…
Good question. Can’t eliminate the BIOS/UEFI on commodity systems. Can’t remove/cut down the BMC. Can’t plumb the hardware root of trust into the OS and VMs. Can’t do dynamic rack-level power capping (future roadmap). There’s a whole bunch of the software stack that only works because the hardware and software were designed together.
Oxide exists in part because commodity systems don’t work for building a cloud at scale (Joyent). Similarly, AWS, GCP, and Azure don’t use commodity systems, they use hardware that was designed to work together with their software, Nitro being a prime example.
> Is there anything they're doing that can't be replicated by hypervisor/management software on commodity x86 servers? Seems like their "secret sauce" is a software stack that "just works" more than any actual special feature of the hardware.
There's a reason Apple is consistently one of the top 5 most valuable companies. It isn't because their hardware does anything that can't be done on "commodity" hardware, its that they built a software stack that "just works" and part of that was tight coupling to the hardware.
Their machines are x86 but they've rearchitected basically everything else in the pursuit of a cohesive and integrated machine, they don't even have a BIOS. The secret sauce is having full control of the software stack, and as close to full control of the firmware as is possible on x86.
Yes, custom hardware is a significant part of Oxide. You have to build your own to do that stuff, and that’s why they did. I alluded to some of the things upthread.
I found out about this round from this thread, just like everybody else, but
> Oxide having to raise money multiple times might be a hint
That’s not the only reason to raise a round, by far, especially when you, you know, are building custom hardware. It isn’t a SaaS business.
> Is there anything they're doing that can't be replicated by hypervisor/management software on commodity x86 servers?
It was technically possible with (e.g.) OpenStack for years (decades?) before Oxide ever existing, and yet even with such a solution being around, some folks still went with Oxide. (Or, depending on the scale you want to talk about: Proxmox, XCP-ng.)
You know whats crazy? We’re in bizarre times were this can actually be true. Things we joked about before which was obviously too nonsensical to be true is no longer the case in my world.
Terge Mathiesen with brilliant asides likeIntelligent discussions now happen on closed forums. My people have moved to mailing lists like arch-general@lists.archlinux.org, or behind authentication firewalls in professional societies.
The public internet is now populated by the sort of people I devotedly avoid in real life...
These days most of the high quality material I read is on Anna's Archive.
Your senators and house reps are the beneficiary of various forms of largesse from political donors.
"Billionaire ** and her *** ** *** are among the most prolific megadonors in modern American political history, funneling hundreds of millions of dollars overwhelmingly to ***, ****"