How it started
Company history
Linuxcare was founded in San Francisco in 1998 by Dave Sifry, Arthur Tyde and Dave LaDuke. The company's initial goal was to be "the 800 number for Linux" and operate 24 hours a day. In the late 1990s, Linux was slowly gaining in popularity as both a desktop and server operating system. A common complaint was that Linux was inappropriate in business environments because obtaining support for Linux involved newsgroups, mailing lists, and websites operated by volunteers. Linuxcare intended to hire some of the disparate Linux experts and get them working together to provide reliable support, for which individuals and businesses would pay.
When Dell started to ship desktop computers with Red Hat Linux pre-installed in 1999, they bundled a coupon that allowed a certain number of free support calls to Linuxcare.
Andrew Tridgell worked on samba, rsync
These experts were allowed to use company time to develop their projects, and were expected to help with technical support in their areas of expertise.
They also hired a number of people from the open source support community including the Linux Gazette "Answer Guy" (Jim Dennis).
From Wikipedia’s article on Levanta, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.2