Linux Distro rPath Gets Venture Backing

Published: February 6, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Commercial Linux distributor rPath, which has a variant of Linux and a build system for creating and deploying software appliances based on Linux, last week said that it has closed its second round of venture capital funding.

General Catalyst, North Bridge Venture Partners, and Wakefield Group have together kicked in $9.1 million in Series B funding, which rPath will use to market and expand its rBuilder and rBuilder Online tools. General Catalyst and North Bridge have already together ponied up $6.4 million in Series A funding.

The rBuilder Online community now has 5,000 projects and 8,000 users, who have downloaded 250,000 software and virtual appliance packages in 2006. These virtual appliances include content management, voice over IP, customer relationship management, groupware, and numerous other types of appliances, which are wrapped up by and--most importantly--maintained by the rBuilder repository. With rBuilder, you can pick and choose different open source software release levels and build your own software stack, and rBuilder takes care up updates of and dependency issues between the software. An appliance can run within a VMware or XenSource partition, or can include partitioned environments itself. rPath Linux, its own flavor of Linux, runs on 32-bit X86 and 64-bit X64 processors only. Two weeks ago, rPath and Virtual Iron, which has created an extended version of the Xen hypervisor that scales across multiple systems, announced that rBuilder Online can be used to create appliances that run on top of the Virtual Iron 3 stack of software, which is used to provision and manage virtual machines that span from slices of a server to multiple servers in a single image.

The rPath stack is not cheap, but then again, the service that is embodied in rBuilder is extremely useful. Access to the rBuilder repository and five copies of rPath Linux costs $5,000, and it costs $15,000 per year per developer to keep the repository updated. ISVs that create appliances have to pay $100 per server socket per year for support and maintenance for each box they sell with the software appliance on top of it. The OEM model that rPath is peddling as well as the idea that companies will want to deploy software appliances into virtual environments--rather than coding for a specific piece of hardware--is one that at least three venture capitalists are willing to bet on. It seems like a safe bet, but good technologies do not always win in the race to get volumes out there in IT Land.

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