Slashdot Mirror
LinuxOne Lite: First Looks
Sensei^ from LinuxNewbie sent us their
Review of LinuxOne. Basically, the distribution is "A Badly Repackaged Mandrake". Read this review: the list of problems is amusing, and it will cause your disgust of the corporate entity known as LinuxOne to climb to a new level.
These folks are clearly in it for the money. Read their website, it's like a brochure for an IPO. It's full of "we will"'s and "leverage" and all kinds of silly superlatives that they provide no evidence to support.
I think the worst has to be the little "LinuxOne Receives Another Initial Software Order" blurb on the sidebar. What's this supposed to be, a subliminal message?
Just reading their site makes me feel like I've been coated in a fine mist of smarm. Yes, these folks have a right to redistribute whatever they want and make claims about it etc. etc. just like anyone else can with GPL'd software.
But it still stinks of greed and a fast-buck mentality.
If you look at the boxes on the store shelves with names like Corel Linux Deluxe or Red Hat 6.1 Deluxe you will find some "closed source"/"binary only" components.
RMS's head might be pressured by all of this; that's not the point.
The thing that they are vulnerable to is of someone demanding to receive copies of the source code to things that are licensed under the GPL, as is their right under the provisions of the GPL.
What LinuxOne are more vulnerable to is the possibility that people might figure out that:
Hopefully most of the "figuring out" of this will take place before they buy anything.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Mind you, if that takes LinuxOne out, in the process, it might not be such a bad thing.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
"Oh no! They used Redhat's distro, and removed reference to Redhat in the installer". The GPL allows that, no?
"They changed nothing in KDE." That's bad? I never change KDE either... It'd suck if every distro decided that KDE should have a different color scheme, and/or resize the icons a couple pixels larger or smaller.
With all the bantering recently about how awful they are, of course no one's going to give them a fair shake. I hate to say it, but so far as the LinuxOne saga goes, I'd just as rather wait for a ZDNet review of their distro than read one from a "Linux" website.
The Linux sites have already declared Redhat, Caldera, Debian, SuSe and Mandrake the winners and LinuxOne to be the loser.
I really do hope that they do well on their IPO and use that money to become a "real" Linux company that everyone will love to hate.
I suppose it depends if you believe in The Market or not. If so, then Market Forces will choose the better distros over the worse ones. Unless LO adds sufficient value over and above Mandrake or RH, why buy it? Personally, I choose RH 'cos I'm familiar with it, and Mandrake (or any other RH-based distro) doesn't give me any value that I think is worth the (admittedly minor) hassle of changing.
ben_ the technologist and platform agnostic
Take Company A (lets say RedHat). They make a great product, they put it out there, people can get what they need done, they don't need to call support. Any support they do need, they get in the free first 180 days of support.
Now take Company B (lets say LinuxOne). They have a buggy LinuxOne Lite, which people need a lot of support for. They have a repackage of a repackage of a distribution. They are missing help files. There's an excellent chance that people won't be able to get to their support forums. They will most likely need support.
Now, Company A's software is more likely to be used in the first place, but there's a good chance that someone could be using Company B's software, throw it away, and just go with Microsoft. Either way gives a bad name for Linux, but Company B is more likely to make money as they have users that 'require' support. And if any of the hype of the LinuxOne Marketing Machine ('You too can have a successful company through marketing!') realize that there might be people out there that are almost forced to use this distribution.
Anyway, with free software, all bets are off in the idea of 'what makes a successful company.' Sometimes, technological markets have a stranger basis than technical merits. I mean, look at DirectPlay from Microsoft. It is *not* better than id's networking code, but it sure is used a lot more...
--
Gonzo Granzeau
Gonzo Granzeau
"Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for.." -Roy Batty
I mean, he does own the name Linux so....
--
Gonzo Granzeau
Gonzo Granzeau
"Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for.." -Roy Batty
With its open source code...
All good and well right? Well, far down below on the same page:
LinuxOne OS will support these new technologies with its sophisticated proprietary device drivers
Now, aside from the fact that they're using proprietary device drivers, which in and of itself would take away my vote for them, they are also hypocritical. It seems to me that the only purpose of this company is to make money while bringing nothing new to Linux users.
Chris Hagar
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson
Sun is NOT releasing the Solaris 8 source. They are distributing Solaris 8 fee-free. They should have been doing this for years, but apparently the S/W division liked it's 'revenue earning' status in the corporate hierarchy.
.sig: Now legally binding!
Well, I guess there is a bad side to open source. We can't stop someone from taking a product, modifying it for the worse and then selling it.
I don't think it's terribly bad. It just has a positive factor in feedback for other attempts. If they see how badly linuxone fails then they will not be tempted to do something this stupid again.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
are not likely to download a huge CDrom image and burn a Linux CD, they're more likely to go to CompUSA and buy Corel Linux or Red Hat or Mandrake or SuSE or Caldera OpenLinux...
and while some of those distros may be more appropriate to newbies than others, ANY of them will be thousands of times better than LO appears to be...
+----------------------------------------------
+------------------------------------------------
+ The urge to destroy is a creative urge
Receives Initial Software Order For $500,000.00
It strikes me as very bad for linux. If companies are going to be spending a half a million dollars on linux, and end up getting a product like "LinuxOne OS" which, according to this review doesn't work at all, they will be very unhappy with "linux" not with linux one. And it could harm linux in extreme ways.
LinuxOne, and the others which are sure to follow, will do what noone has been able to do before, give linux a bad reputation as a buggy, useless, inferior software.
I for one am very worried.
So I'm of the opinion that there is no 'one true distro.' Each distro is targeted at a specific group. Debian is for the true blue gnu freaks, turbolinux offers excellent support of pacific rim languages, corel is for newbies etc...
So what market is linuxone targeting? I've wrestled with this question and come to a conclusion, it's for people who want the pentium optimized binaries of mandrake, but find the term 'mandrake' to be offensive. If this describes you, then you should check out this distro. If you do not find the term 'mandrake' offensive then you should probably take a sensitivity training course you sexist/speciesist/whatever bastard!
Yeah, it's not a serious post, but it's not like linuxone's a serious company/distro.
--Shoeboy
Q: Can I access the Internet?
:)
A: Certainly. To access the Internet, return to
Windows because the Lite version is built on
top of Windows. Another option is to use
LinuxOne OS.
Ummm...no, thanks. I'll stick to a regular distro for now
"We want to call Shenanigan on these people"
"Now, you know you can't just go around calling Shenanigans on people without good reason."
"But they sold me this Linux distribution and it won't even boot!"
"Well, we'll just have to see about that. Let's try it on my police laptop..." (Vendor deftly switches LinuxOne CD for Redhat 6.1) "Well, now, there you see, boys, it boots just fine!"
"But..But...it didn't work! They're crooks!"
...the list of problems is amusing...
I, for one, am not all that amused. How many new potential Linux users will install this (or try to) and fail miserably, then conclude that Linux is crap. How many of them will tell their friends about their misfortune? Will Big Bad Bill point to this and say "See, we told ya! It's hard to install and buggy. Come back to us and we'll hold your hand and make it all better."
We know that LinuxOne != Linux, but newbies may try to equate the two. This could end up alienating many converts to the light side. We are now between a rock and a hard place: we want LinuxOne to bite turf, but we don't want Linux itself to crash and burn with it.
In our advocacy of Linux, let's be sure to point people to some of the many fine distros that are available and steer folks away from LinuxOne.
Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter-accusations.
Incidentally, VA Linux does not make hardware. They're a reseller for a small PC assembler in Fremont, CA. Read their SEC filing.
Historically, there are very few examples of companies that had huge price/revenue ratios and eventually grew up to generate enough profits to justify them. (Exercise for investors: name three.) But there are many examples of speculative bubbles.
The Linux stocks aren't the usual growth company situation. Usually, you have big revenue, big expenses, and small profits. The classic good example is Amazon.com. (The classic bad example is Buy.com, which has a business model of selling at a loss and making it up on volume.) But both Red Hat and VA Linux have small revenue, no profits, no valuable assets, and a huge market cap. That's not a growth company. It's something else, and it's not good.
The current market is running on what's called "greater fool theory", the hope that, even though you own something that's overpriced, there's some sucker out there who will buy it for even more money. As with all Ponzi schemes, eventually you run out of suckers.
There is going to be a bloodbath in these stocks. Probably this year.