Freeos In Us Foray, Seeks $5 Million Funding

While FreeOS.com provides consultancy and maintenance services for a wide array of free operating systems, the company has been basically focusing on a particular free operating system called Linux.

"Most of the activity is happening on the Linux front and a majority of our users are Linux users," Advani said.

The company has been encouraged to set shop in the US as IBM has decided to invest more than $200 million in the Linux operating system for computer servers this July.

IBM, along with Intel - the computer chips maker, has been actively supporting this system in order to compete with Microsoft's operating system MS Windows.

 

As a part of its promotion campaign in the US, FreeOS.com will participate in the Linux World Expo and Conference 2000 for the first time, said Advani.

FreeOS.com mainly provides articles, documentation, download sites, news, links and other data related to free operating systems. These include FreeBSD, Linux, Alliance OS, AROS, BPMK, Chaos, eCos, EROS, Free-VMS, Freedows, GNU_Hurd, JOS, Minix, NetBSD, Oberon, OpenBSD, ReactOS, RTEMS, V2_OS and VSTa. The two-year old company had received Rs one crore from angel investor Arvind Shah of Boston Education and Software in its first round of funding.

According to Advani, the benefits of free operating systems are that it is comparatively free of bugs and can be modified to suit the person's needs through its source codes.

An operating system is software required to operate any computer system - examples are Windows, MacOS, Unix and Linux. While Linux is a free operating system (can be downloaded as well as distributed for free), the other three are commercial operating systems and have to be bought from software vendors.