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To: mact who wrote (87)	12/14/1999 1:08:00 AM
From: puborectalis	Respond to of 160

More money for Linux plays...this is not a fad but a groundswell for venture capitalists....Tuesday December 14, 12:00 am Eastern Time Linuxcare gets $32.5 mln in funds,buys three firms SAN FRANCISCO, Dec 13 (Reuters) - Linuxcare Inc., a startup providing services for the renegade Linux operating system, said it received $32.5 million in financing, which includes Dell Computer Corp. (NasdaqNM:DELL - news), Sun Microsystems Inc. (NasdaqNM:SUNW - news), Oracle Corp. (NasdaqNM:ORCL - news) and Motorola Inc. (NYSE:MOT - news) among its investors. The San Francisco-based company, which started up last year, also announced three small acquisitions, as its seeks to beef up its staff with more technical gurus and more capabilties. Linuxcare said that its second round of financing was led by Patricof & Co. Ventures and included its international affiliate, Apax Partners Europe, and Integral Capital Partners. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which lead the first round of financing, also participated in this round. ''The amount of investment is larger than I have seen in the Linux market,'' said George Weiss, an analyst at the Gartner Group. ''It indicates to me that there is a tremenous amount of confidence they are generating.'' As Wall Street has recently become enamoured with companies targeting the Linux operating system, Fernand Sarrat, the company's president and chief executive, said that Linuxcare got more offers of investment than it was looking for. ''We wanted a measly $25 million, we ended up with offers of $300 million on the table,'' Sarrat said. He said that the company has an ''aggressive mindset'' toward going public, after observing the recent hot initial public offerings of Red Hat Inc. (NasdaqNM:RHAT - news), Andover.Net Inc. (NasdaqNM:ANDN - news), and VA Linux Systems Inc. (NasdaqNM:LNUX - news). ''There is an increasing interest on our part,'' Sarrat said. ''There is an overwhelming interest on the part of the (investment) bankers.'' He declined to say when Linuxcare might look at going public. Linuxcare is the only company yet to focus exclusively on services for Linux, which is not owned by any one company, but which is making inroads within corporations as an alternative to Microsoft Corp.'s (NasdaqNM:MSFT - news) Windows NT for some applications. . Red Hat for example, sells Linux at retail and offers services to its customers. VA Linux develops hardware, such as servers that are optimized to run Linux and it provides some services. Linuxcare also said it made three small acquisitions. It acquired the Puffin Group in Ottawa, a group of about nine developers working on Linux for the network appliance market. Puffin has also been working with Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE:HWP - news) to create a version of Linux to run on H-P's servers that normally run the Unix operating system. Linux is a free version of the Unix operating system, developed by Finnish programmer Linus Torvalds and maintained by a group of far-flung programmers around the world. Linuxcare also bought Prosa, a consulting firm of about six people based in Padua, Italy, who are known for ET Linux, a version of Linux to run on dedicated devices. Prosa is also well-known in the Linux community for the device drivers it has created for Linux, programs that link it to peripheral devices. It also bought Cheek Consulting of Seattle, which has a big database of Linux technical information, which will be integrated with Linuxcare's existing data. No financial details were disclosed about the three acquisitions.