Sure, you can think of Red Hat as being an unconventional name for a software company when it first came on the Linux scene. (Nobody thinks that today, but it was pretty odd back then.) But if you thought that was odd for a Linux vendor, consider that it could have been something just a tad stranger -- like Yggdrasil.
Yggdrasil?
Um hmm. Spelled just that way and pronounced "IG-dra-sil." In Norse mythology it's the name of the tree of life that is said to support the sky. There are a few places on the 'net that go into the mythology. However, what's interesting to me is the role Yggdrasil Computing played in the early days of Linux. And even more interesting could be the role this same company plays in Linux's present and future.
Quite a few people I know -- myself included -- got their first Linux experience from the Linux Bible, which hasn't been updated since the mid-90s but still has a place on Yggdrasil's web site. The thousand-plus-paged Bible is fairly primitive by today's standards; it contains a compendium of reference man pages, tutorial HOWTOs and other files from what is now known as the Linux Documentation Project. These days such stuff is common on every Linux CD and is all over the web in multiple languages. But in the early to mid-'90s, Internet access was not quite so widespread and paper copies were the norm for many.
In my recollection, the Yggdrasil book was also the first to include a CD of installable Linux. "It was horrible to install," my Starnix partner Matthew Rice recalls, "but back then, it was all pretty horrible." Thus, Yggdrasil was one of the first Linux distributions (dating back to 1992) and it was certainly the first that was widely available.
Then, for no apparent reason, the company dropped out of sight towards the end of the millennium, just when Linux vendors started getting hype and the bandwagon started to fill.
And now it's back. With a vengeance? We're not sure yet.
Adam Richter, head of the Silicon Valley-based company, says Yggdrasil's new release of a DVD full of free software is the first of what could be a number of new products. The Yggdrasil Linux DVD Archives packs more than 8 gigabytes (about the same as a dozen CDs' worth) of compressed source code onto a single disk, about double what you get with the only previous DVD collection that I know of from SuSE. It uncompresses into 23GB of free software -- heck, even the list of contents alone is more than 6MB. It's a collection of the FTP archives of MetaLab and the GNU project, excluding distributions and non-free software.
This first new product from Yggdrasil after many years of silence is being released without a lot of fanfare. Mainly designed as a proof of concept, the new DVD will be sold only through the company's website, not through bookstores (like the Linux Bible was) or even familiar outlets such as LinuxMall. Furthermore, this bundle contains neither binaries nor any distributions -- it's only meant for those already running Linux.
"The purpose of releasing it is to prove the technology," Richter said. "We have deliberately not put the first edition into the reseller channel because we aren't asking them to shoulder that risk. Once Linux DVD Archives has established some technical and business performance, then we may roll out a future edition into the reseller channel in an organized manner."
Richter said the company didn't go after the venture capital, staffing expansion or marketing blitzes of other Linux companies of the last few years because the company wasn't ready for it -- then. "We needed to be more poised for growth, in terms of having working infrastructure in place, people ready, clearer path to a liquidable event," he said. "I think we have largely accomplished that in the past year." Richter added that no new capital was required in order to produce the DVD product.
What Yggdrasil may or may not do in the future is still a riddle. Richter is almost IBM-like in his unwillingness to talk about future directions and products. Still, he said that the company's website is getting an overhaul and that the company was spending significant resources on "internal development."
In other words, something's coming, we're just not sure what. In response to a question about whether a future Yggdrasil Linux distribution might contribute to fragmentation, here's what Richter said:
"Although fragmentation is not as bad for mutually compatible free software as it is for proprietary software, we are interested in addressing this inefficiency. We have publicly released some development snapshots of software designed to address the issue of software package tracking in a more packaging system independent way. When or if this might affect a future product, I won't say, but it demonstrates that we take the fragmentation problem seriously and are looking for more creative solutions than 'everyone should just switch our product'."
Read into that what you will. I'm just happy to see the re-entry of a familiar face among the startups and hangers-on, especially that of a company that's always cared about both the cause of free software and the desire to be profitable. I wish Adam and the company well.
Even if I don't have a DVD reader yet.
Do you remember using Yggdrasil Linux? Let me know in the TalkBack below.
