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Xandros buys Linspire – What does it mean for Linux? (ITPro)
ITPro writes off Xandros and Linspire in this lengthy article. "Where Xandros is sold in a box, Ubuntu is given away free. Where Ubuntu is seen to donate code back to the community, Xandros and Linspire have developed proprietary extensions. Where Ubuntu asks for manufacturers to free their drivers, Xandros and Linspire have signed patent covenants with Microsoft.
Being easy to install and easy to use is not enough. The first lesson of 'open source business' is that your first debt is to your user and developer communities, from which everything else grows. OEMs will look first to the most popular alternative."
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Xandros buys Linspire – What does it mean for Linux? (ITPro) Posted Jul 11, 2008 16:34 UTC (Fri) by johnkarp (subscriber, #39285) [Link] I think the article they posted must be incomplete, it trails off rather suddenly at the end.
Xandros buys Linspire – What does it mean for Linux? (ITPro) Posted Jul 11, 2008 17:26 UTC (Fri) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] It cuts off just when it was getting good. Maybe their editors decided the next 10 paragraphs praising Fedora's latest release were off-topic. Though I do have to wonder about the deal between Canonical and Linspire concerning CNR. The article dismisses it entirely, but is the concept really dead, or is it walking the earth in fashionably un-dead style? For a historical romp through Xandros and Linspire's closet of skeletons I find the lack of effort to find any substantiating evidence concerning the state of that CNR partnership with Canonical to be quite disappointing. If anything the impact of the merger on the CNR deal with Canonical is one of the only interesting questions concerning the merger moving forward. To be quite honest, the article is an extremely poor read and the content really doesn't match the headline hook. It's essentially an editorialized summary of the history of Xandros and Linspire using easily found existing statements and press releases. There's very little insight into what are the important impacts of what's currently going on. And certainly very little here which says anything about " What does it mean for Linux?" as the headline would lead us to believe. Don't we as a community deserve better attempts at news writing than this. What does the merger actually mean for us? -jef
Xandros buys Linspire – What does it mean for Linux? (ITPro) Posted Jul 11, 2008 17:17 UTC (Fri) by beoba (guest, #16942) [Link] I honestly didn't know either of these distros were still active. Distrowatch says that the most recent version of Xandros, 4.1, was released Nov 2006. Linspire 6 came out last October, but that was about 1.5 years following their 5.1 release.
Xandros buys Linspire – What does it mean for Linux? (ITPro) Posted Jul 11, 2008 19:37 UTC (Fri) by NigelK (guest, #42083) [Link] Distrowatch is irrelevant for Xandros as its main channel is in pre-installed devices. Funny old world, isn't it? *Years* of bitching about how Linux hasn't entered the mainstream, then two million Eees later and the bitching has changed to people using "the wrong kind of Linux". Xandros has raised Linux's profile immeasurably in the non-geek markets, and yet they're targets for heaps of hate and bile because of the prejudices of very vocal by-standers. Where's the off-the-shelf Ubuntu UMPCs? Debian? How about Mandriva? Nope, none to be found on the shop shelves. Nothing in Toys R Us. Nothing. There's an inconvenient truth in there for some people.
Xandros buys Linspire – What does it mean for Linux? (ITPro) Posted Jul 11, 2008 19:53 UTC (Fri) by sfeam (subscriber, #2841) [Link]
> Where's the off-the-shelf Ubuntu UMPCs? Debian? How about Mandriva?
I don't know about Ubuntu or Debian, but for Mandriva there is the "Kira":
http://www.linux-wizard.net/index.php?id_blog=202
Slightly wider but thinner than the EEE according to the specs.
Xandros buys Linspire – What does it mean for Linux? (ITPro) Posted Jul 11, 2008 20:50 UTC (Fri) by beoba (guest, #16942) [Link] If that was the impression I was giving, I'm sorry. I just hadn't seen anything out of either project for some time, and assumed they had gone into maintenance mode.
Xandros buys Linspire – What does it mean for Linux? (ITPro) Posted Jul 11, 2008 20:51 UTC (Fri) by beoba (guest, #16942) [Link] Also, what do you mean by "heaps of hate and bile"?
Xandros buys Linspire – What does it mean for Linux? (ITPro) Posted Jul 12, 2008 10:13 UTC (Sat) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link] I always suspected that Asus chose Xandros because they thought their contract with Xandros shielded them from the GNU GPL. They later discovered it was not the case...
Xandros buys Linspire – What does it mean for Linux? (ITPro) Posted Jul 11, 2008 18:16 UTC (Fri) by einstein (subscriber, #2052) [Link] 2 obscure distros merge - what does it mean to the linux world? not much.
Xandros buys Linspire – What does it mean for Linux? (ITPro) Posted Jul 12, 2008 0:42 UTC (Sat) by errare_est (guest, #14275) [Link] Despite the "Ubuntu Free as in Freedom" perception, this is bugging me: http://www.canonical.com/netbooks
Xandros buys Linspire – What does it mean for Linux? (ITPro) Posted Jul 12, 2008 2:34 UTC (Sat) by wrasse (guest, #52870) [Link] Red Hat Global Desktop is/was going down the same route as Ubuntu Netbook Remix in terms of licensing codecs. This is understandable -- Joe and Jane Doe will not buy a box that doesn't play Mp3s or DVDs. It's more interesting that Ubuntu is beating Red Hat to the market.
Xandros buys Linspire – What does it mean for Linux? (ITPro) Posted Jul 12, 2008 4:51 UTC (Sat) by arjan (subscriber, #36785) [Link] I'd think the various binary kernel drivers would be an earlier issue...
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