So the company began considering offers from other companies, Angell said. It had hoped to finalise a deal with one company, but a more attractive offer came from a second, and Mission Critical Linux decided to pursue that one instead. But that fell apart, and in the meantime the offer from the first company had been significantly reduced: Mission Critical Linux would have had to lay off staff, with no severance and probably still would seek relief in bankruptcy court, Angell said. Nondisclosure agreements prohibit Angell from saying which companies were interested in Mission Critical Linux, but sources have said one was Red Hat, the leading Linux seller. With buyout hopes on the wane, Angell formed a new corporation -- which soon will be named Mission Critical Linux LLC -- and bought the old company's assets with funding from undisclosed investors. "The money is already in place," he said, though "the exact names of the investors have not settled." He would say only that a combination of individuals and venture capitalists had chipped in. "We've raised more than enough to see (the new company) through the next year," Angell said. Linux, invented by Linus Torvalds and developed by a large group of programmers, blossomed in the late 1990s into a viable operating system for servers and became the heart of numerous start-ups. But with the end of the Internet hype and the economic pullback, many of those companies have struggled for survival. Mission Critical Linux still faces competition from Red Hat, which is working on a high-end version of Linux that has some similarities to Convolo. Red Hat said in January that it had hired Brian Stevens, the former chief technology officer of Mission Critical Linux. The new Mission Critical Linux will work to try to decrease the "failover" times in the Convolo NetGuard product, will continue to develop its Convolo DataGuard product to make the Network File System (NFS) software more robust, and will perform some custom programming work for selected customers.
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