My memory had LinuxOne scam being revealed quickly.

Posted Jan 17, 2008 22:18 UTC (Thu) by rickmoen (subscriber, #6943)
In reply to: My memory had LinuxOne scam being revealed quickly. by TxtEdMacs
Parent article: Ten-year timeline, part 2: the bubble days

TxtEdMacs, that would be me.

I was chief system administrator at a then-well-known open source firm, and kept hearing from one of our sales force about how promising LinuxOne and its new distribution was. He had one of their sample CDs, so I looked through it, researched the company, kept finding slightly odd things and so kept digging. By the following day, I had enough for a carefully factual post about the firm to Silicon Valley Linux User Group's main discussion e-mail list -- which got me separate invitations from The Register and IDG (linuxworld.com) to write full articles. After verifying that they were OK with my doing both pieces, I did a write-up (in IDG's case, in collaboration with one of their staff writers whose double-checking of facts was invaluable).

The full story thus came out in a few days, and it gave me no pleasure to write it. If I recall correctly, the firm changed its business model, but then disappeared fairly soon thereafter.

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com

My memory had LinuxOne scam being revealed quickly.

Posted Jan 17, 2008 22:26 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

The LinuxOne thing persisted into at least February - they had a booth at LinuxWorld NY. They wandered over to the SUSE booth at one point and put SUSE on notice that it was an acquisition target once the IPO went through. I also had a conversation with an underwriter during that time about the company's prospects. All told, the LinuxOne story took a good six months to run its full course.

Much like SCO, LinuxOne's nature was almost immediately obvious to the sort of people who read LWN. People who did not understand Linux were much slower to figure the whole thing out.