Fixstars Acquires Terra Soft Solutions

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Fixstars Corp has announced their acquisition of Loveland, Colorado based Terra Soft Solutions.  Terra Soft is best known as the developer and support organization for Yellow Dog Linux [Linux on the PowerPC].  Terra Soft has grown from a small startup in 1999 to provide support and services to Lockheed, Boeing, NASA and several DoE labs.

Kai Staats, former CEO of Terra Soft Solutions, now COO of Fixstars Solutions states, “Terra Soft started with my personal credit card and what in retrospect was an unlikely team to create a Linux distribution: a 17 year old sys admin, FileMaker Pro programmer, graphic designer, and marketing consultant. Dan, Troy, Jake and I threw ourselves into the challenge of building something which we were told (more than once) was impossible. Over one hundred Linux companies came and went, but we always pulled through.”

Fixstars made the acquisition in order to complete its Cell/BE product solution set.  Terra Soft began working with the Cell under contract to Mercury Computer in 2005.  Since then, they have expanded support to the Sony PS3.  In 2007, they released Yellow Dog v6.0 with support for the IBM BladeCenter QS2x.

Fixstars has stated that they will rebadge the Terra Soft crew as ‘Fixstars Solutions Inc’.  Under the new nameplate, the team will continue to develop and support Yellow Dog as the only Linux OS with support for every Cell/BE based product on the market [including Fixstars own GigaAccel 180 and Sony ZEGO BCU-1000].

A Cell/B.E. software developer and long-time user of Yellow Dog Linux, Fixstars has great faith in Yellow Dog Linux,” said Satoshi Miki, CEO of Fixstars. “This business acquisition allows us to offer a reliable and stable Linux distribution with sense of ease for our customers. I have no doubt that in the expanding Cell/B.E. ecosystem we will offer the best Cell/B.E. solution of the High Performance Computing generation.”

For more information on the acquisition, read the full release here.