Terra Soft Solutions Acquired by Fixstars

Today Fixstars Corporation announced it has acquired Terra Soft Solutions, the company behind Yellow Dog Linux. Fixstars has created a new subsidiary to manage the Terra Soft employees, products, and offices.

Fixstars provides application development and optimization tools for Cell Broadband Engine multi-core processors. This makes the acquisition of Terra Soft fitting from the historical standpoint, and promising for Yellow Dog's future.

Terra Soft's Yellow Dog Linux was the only viable option not so many years ago for anyone interested in running Linux on a Mac with a PPC architecture. Terra Soft became a Value Added Reseller, officially licensed to install their alternative operating system on Apple computers.

It's been several years since I last used Yellow Dog to pry a little more life out of an old iMac that couldn't deliver the needed up-to-date applications with System 9. Even back in the "dark ages" of Linux -- and prior to Apple's move from the Power architecture to Intel chips -- Yellow Dog was powerful, lightweight and (most important for my situation) stable.

When Apple made the switch to Intel processors, it didn't make the "former" Yellow Dog releases useless, of course. There were (and are) still many PPC Macs (and other devices) out there that can have their lives extended (and enhanced) by the older Yellow Dog releases (and a number of distributions have since offered PPC support for releases). But it was obvious that Terra Soft would need to branch in other directions.

They have done so, and it seems that both companies -- and the industries they serve -- will ultimately benefit.