Re:I used to work for LinuxCare... (Score 2, Informative)

I currently work for Levanta and overlapped with you for part of the time you were there. I know who you are but I won't reveal your identity.

Perhaps, because I am a current employee, my perspective is more skewed, but my recollections of the chain of events is different from yours.

Avery Lyford was hired as CEO in September of 2001. He hired Art Olbert from IBM in October and Akmal Khan from SGI in January of 2002.

Art started the original Linuxcare product that was later code-named "Odin" using the people left over from the previous Linuxcare incarnation. The project had some major flaws in both the architecture and the implementation.

AK and another ex-SGI engineer, Nate Stahl, architected a new filesystem which later became MAPFS (and was Open-Sourced) which became the core of what is currently Levanta.

You are right that AK made no bones about disliking the distributed nature of the development group as he is a firm believer in centralized development teams for core work. To his credit, he was open and honest about that (as you have noted) and started to put the necessary skills together in SF. He hired Adam Fineberg, who later replaced him as VP of Engineering, and quickly put together a team to architect and implement what was codenamed the Freya project from scratch.

AK was the principal architect of the Freya project and he himself coded the initial object framework. I would describe him as a "hands-on" technical leader rather than a "micro-manager" as you do. He had little love for the zVM project and was more interested in implementing Levanta on the x86 architecture. The first release of Freya, however, was made on the existing zVM machines in order to not abandon the customers who were already running Odin. Freya was implemented from conception to release in about 7 months - an incredible achievement for code written on a blank sheet of paper. I would also note that since then, no project at Levanta has taken more than 6 months to implement - including the Intrepid hardware appliance. The article did not mention that AK was also the architect for the Intrepid appliance.

I can understand the misgivings that those of you who were on the service end of the axe might feel. Having been there myself in the past, I can sympathize fully. In retrospect, the actions taken were probably the right ones and saved Levanta from ceasing to exist.

Matt Mossman joined in January of 2005 to take the helm of Levanta from AK who had been the acting CEO until then after Avery was axed. Matt brings a history of Funding and merger experience from Oracle and some VC company (I forget the name) where he was a partner. He is exactly the skills we need at Levanta to take us to the next level - if not to IPO, then to a profitable acquisition.