Is this an "advertorial"?

Posted Nov 26, 2003 12:21 UTC (Wed) by ekj (subscriber, #1524) [Link]

First: Congrats on taking the critique seriously rather than sulking in the corner. That is a trait I see *waaay* to seldom in a journalist.

You want suggestions for better questions. Obviously I can only speak for myself, and not for all the others, but here are some of the things I'd like to hear about a new (for me) distribution;

* What makes them different from all the other gazillion distros out there ?

* In which way do the distro contribute to the overall Open Source development ? What code if any have they written, improved or released ?

* What is their position on the political scale ? Free as in Freedom only ? Free only in main-distro but proprietary add-ons available ? Proprietary parts in the main-distro that makes the thing useless for a user who prefers to urn only free stuff ?

* Which direction are they going ? What areas are they focusing on improving in the future ? What do they see as the important part ?

* Whats the scale of their effort ? How many programmers do they employ ?
(Sorry, I personally have very little interest in how many marketing-droids they have)

* How is the maintenance ? For how long are older releases supported ? Does it cost anything to receive bugfixes/updates (this was actually partly adressed in your interview), how does upgrades from one version to the next happen ?

Lastly, it matters perhaps more who you talk to than about what. This sounded like a marketing-guy. Noone here is interested or impressed that they have a utility for configuring grub and/or lilo, so has every other distro and it's nothing even remotely new or interesting. Try if you can get an interview with one of the engineers actually working on the distro. Ask him what he did this week, and what is his plans for the next half-year.

Posted Nov 26, 2003 22:07 UTC (Wed) by ogre (guest, #14142) [Link]

I don't think your questions were particularly bad, some of them were perfect leadins to their marketing but mostly they weren't too bad. I think the big problem was that the answers you got were canned marketoid material. It makes the whole interview read like a promotional piece you would find on their website.

As for alternate questions, it doesn't matter what you asked the answers would have been run through a PR speak filter and been equally bland. I think the interview makes a big statement about the sort of company that Xandros really is.

-- Dennis

Posted Dec 4, 2003 15:22 UTC (Thu) by Sauja (guest, #17526) [Link]

Xandros has a extremely solid and easy distro even version 1.0 (which is more than a 1.0 version since Corel already had a very solid OS for Xandros to start from).

Version 2.0 will be even better and until it is released, not much more can be said.

The one thing Xandros has been missing as a company is Marketing, and I'm glad to see some at last. (I am so tired of hearing about Lindows and thier antics!)

I find value in the add-ons or enhancements that Xandros provides, and they are under no obligation to release those. They give Xandros a competitive advantage over Lindows and Lycoris and that's fine by me. (Although I too would like to know more specifics on what contributions they've made).

Xandros is positioning itself as an alternative to Windows. If you already have an "All Free" distro that you are happy with, this isn't for you anyway.

You can't condemn them for putting marketing ahead of development, because they aren't. The marketing just has so much catching up to do.

Sauja