Xandros Reportedly Buys Out Linspire 153
2muchcoffeeman writes "Former Linspire president and CEO Kevin Carmony — whose relationship with his former employer has turned acrimonious, to say the least — reported on his blog that Xandros and Linspire signed an agreement in principle for Xandros to buy Linspire June 19. Carmony includes a scan of the memo to Linspire shareholders announcing the deal, which requires the former Linspire company to change its name. According to the memo, the stockholders voted to change the company's name to Digital Cornerstone, Inc. Despite the wording of the Linspire memo to stockholders, this deal apparently came as a surprise to Carmony and other stockholders. Some here may remember that both Xandros and Linspire signed patent protection deals with Microsoft in 2007."
Obscure stuff (Score:5, Interesting)
I think Linspire users must be as rare as hen's teeth, I've certainly never even heard of a single person using it, other than the guy who reviewed it for distrowatch. Same goes for Xandros. though I did download that one once to check it out with a windows-stranded friend in mind, but saw no advantage over Ubuntu.
Come to think of it, who the heck is eweek?
Used Freespire (And Lindows) (Score:4, Interesting)
eWeek and Spencer the Cat (Score:2, Interesting)
Infoworld and eWeek were the computer tabloids that wished they were Byte or even Compute!, they had more articles that shilled products than they had neutral articles if you could find one. Most editors and writers got bribed by computer companies to write a good article on their product in exchange for keeping the product plus other gifts.
Spencer the Cat was the gossip guy, but around 2000 his gossip columns became more advertising and less rumor. I think when he made a prediction that Microsoft would switch to a Xenix clone named Winix to compete with Linux was when he lost his mojo back during the Clinton Administration and Dotcom busts that made gossip and rumor columns had to get info so they started to make stuff up.
Re:Obscure stuff (Score:3, Interesting)
My first home server ran Xandros. After a failed attempt many years ago with Redhat, then a half-way working attempt with Debian, I found Xandros (2.0 at the time, I think) to be something that "just worked". I kept that server running for a few years, before I switched to Ubuntu.
At the time it was $99 well spent, since it made Linux work for a non-user, hardware engineer. Since then Ubuntu (and OpenOffice) have filled that gap well and it's just not necessary to buy a distribution for those benefits.
Re:eWeek and Spencer the Cat (Score:3, Interesting)
Gladly, Infoworld explores such a thing here [infoworld.com].
It is no secret that vendors give out "gifts" and this happens for many corporations even magazine publishing corporations.
So you are telling me that despite Infoworld employees being given "gifts" by vendors, it does not influence how they write their article, and just because the article written is positive and the writer and/or editor got "gifts" it is not selling out or shilling or even considered unethical?
That somehow because I cited a problem in the media, it means I do a shitty job?
Well to be civil, and because you are upset and angry over it and it appears I touched a nerve, I will withdraw the statement for your sake. I don't want you getting stressed out over it, or anyone to say you did anything wrong over it, eWeek too as well as Infoworld. :)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Obscure stuff (Score:3, Interesting)
Xandros? I used it, and installed it for like 5 people.
That was, of course, WAYY back when it was "Corel Linux", an innovative desktop for sure (and yes, they fell behind because they forked KDE... but man it was SO COOL being able to resize your display rez without restarting X... yes, Linux was THAT bad back then).
The other distros were all neat back when Red Hat was IGNORING the desktop. They still are, but Ubuntu has steamrolled and consolidated this space... and deservedly so!
Re:Eee (Score:2, Interesting)
I remember the days when PC magazine was a good magazine. It had reviews, technical howto articles and did decent reviews. I still remember the war between Windows and OS/2. As Microsoft became the only player in town, the magazine stopped being "PC magazine" and became "Windows magazine". Then it went all downhill.
Re:eWeek and Spencer the Cat (Score:3, Interesting)
I accept the apology. I likewise apologize; you made me hot under the collar, because as you point out above, people in my industry have to take crap like this all the time.
I'll put it to you this way, and then I'll leave it alone, because you've already apologized and it's seriously off-topic anyway: You can say that I or any of my colleagues in the industry are stupid. You can say we don't know what we're talking about. You can say we can't write. You could say you could do a better job than us. You can say we're ugly and we smell, for all I care. None of that matters to me; when you sign your name to something that you publish online, you set yourself up for that. But when you call into question someone's professionalism, their dedication, their standards, and their ethics, and you imply that they're somehow corrupt and easily bought, and you do it in such a way that it sounds like you're stating some kind of incontrovertible facts -- to me, that's not right. When I hear that, I feel compelled to set you straight. The people I have had the pleasure to work alongside in this industry are not prostitutes, nor are they shills for Microsoft or any other company. I suspect people will never quit saying that they are, but I may never cease to be annoyed by it. That's all.
Re:Commercial Viability (Score:3, Interesting)
Precisely. I never expected Linspire to succeed, partly because of what they were trying to do, and partly because of who it was that was trying to do it, and partly because of when they were trying to do it - long after the ship for Yet Another Proprietary Linux Distro had already sailed.
Xandros had, in their day, a better shot at what they were trying to do. When Xandros came out, they put some user-friendly wrappings around Debian and took extra care to make it integrate easily and well into a Windows network. The problems they face, as I see it, were:
1) Xandros was too expensive.
2) Very slow release cycle. Xandros releases tend to come so far apart they make Debian look downright speedy.
3) They had proprietary bits, and that tends to make you unpopular with much of the Linux community.
I actually spent a little time with Xandros; my dad had bought a copy of it. Xandros has a lot going for it, but I found it to be inflexible, in large part because of the aforementioned slow release cycle. They were way behind pretty much everyone, and you couldn't point Xandros at some other repositories and bring it up to date without breaking all sorts of stuff. If Xandros had been on the kind of aggressive release cycle that Ubuntu has followed, they might well have been a major success, even allowing for points 1 and 3.
Re:Obscure stuff (Score:3, Interesting)
I am former Linspire user, now I use Freespire.
You can see a picture of me using Linspire here:
http://www.linspire.com/lraiser_success.php?serial=318 [linspire.com]
(rather old picture anyway).
My main cmoputer iss an HP Pavilion dv 5000 laptop. Ubuntu prior 8.04 didn't recognize the wifi card (unless you do extensive hacking, to have a sub-standart result). With Freespire it works "out of the box" (using NDISwrapper). Everything work very easy, even easier than Ubuntu (my wife machine, a Sony VAIO VGN-CR220E, uses Ubuntu).
But I tried the 8.04 liveCD in my HP and a wizard downloaded the driver for my wifi, so there is no need to keep on using Freespire, but I didn't found time to make the change, yet.
CNR is a big selling point of Freespire/Linspire, but it will be available to Ubuntu AFAIK. (see http://www.cnr.com./ [www.cnr.com]
Freespire were releasing several products every month at the beginning, but now they are somehow without to much activity.
If you value your time, Linspire is not a bad choice.