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LinuxOne CTO Interview

Posted by Roblimo on from the let's-try-to-be-nice dept.

PraveenS writes "There's an in-depth analysis of LinuxOne and its IPO at linuxtoday.com. Paul Ferris of Linuxtoday spoke with LinuxOne CTO Dr. Peter Milford. Here's an interesting quote: "Our next version will have applications on it that no one else has." However, he said little else, making one wonder if they really do have something great. Also, it seems LinuxOne is not entirely unaware of the controversy surrounding them; they're holding a "Flame of the Week Contest." "

1 of 126 comments (clear)

  1. Once a fraud, sill a fraud by Oliver · · Score: 5

    I had a talk with one of the guys at their booth yesterday. I think it was their CFO.
    At first, he sounded quite reasonable and said things like they had not been doing well on their side and "deserve[d] all the 'abuse' we got from the Linux community" aswell as that there was a lawyer that did not understand the spirit of the community, but he got fired, etc...
    All the top management (/C?O/) has been replaced in the last two weeks and on their press material nowhere could the name of their doubious founder be found.
    At first, I almost fell for their arguments, that they were "newly reborn", "got rid of the evil", but some indepth questions made me even more suspicious then before. First, he didn't want to answer my questions about how large their staff was, only that they had guys "here and there" like in Taiwan, where "guys at the Ministry of Something have guys working on Linux" (aha! for LinuxOne?) and some in California. Realizing that I was writing for a Japanese publisher he claimed "we have a very successfull Japanese version". Gotcha. After telling him, that I KNOW that that is an absolute lie, because I am at the center of the community there (board of linu.or.jp), his statement suddenly changed to "we are having an alliance with the largest software ditributor there", and named an absolutely unknown name, not even sounding Japanese. He said that their Japanesation Engeneer would get in contact with me the same day, but I have not heared from him yey.
    Also their press kit is a JOKE. When this stuff appeared at the press root, most of the press (that has a clue) burst out in laughter. Now they are sellin Harddisks as "LinuxOne OS Easy Drive", 13.5GB for $169.95 and $17.3GB for $199.95. Also their "Partial List of Drivers" boasts about "USB UHCI support", "USB keyboard support", "3C507", "Infrared-port devices". Also it runs "with devices[...] such as ADSL and cable modems" (yeah, mine eat 100Base-T)
    Statements like "When ready to resume Winows, simply type 'reboot' [...] and LinuxOne Win/Lite terminated" just make me laugh. Guess I have had an amusing afternoon reading this crap.
    Because the CFO said, "it was a bad decision to announce intentions IPO, you simple don't do that" I asked him, wheter they were going to delay their IPO untill they repaired their reputation (which he promised to do), he was "not allowed to say" (quiet period?) but "it was every intention to IPO as soon as possible when the company was founded". So they havn't changed, though admitting what they do is wrong.

    I am even more convinced that they indeed are a FRAUD, but were trying very hard to cover that up. Without knowing their history and being a community activist, I'd probably fallen for their arguments. The general public MUST be WARNED about this monstrosity.

    PS: When Linus worked by, the guy asked to take a picture with Linus. After noticing that he was LinuxOne Linus explictly disallowed them to use this picture for marketing/PR purposes or post it publicaly. I have witnessed this dialoge from a distance of 1m and are willing to testify as a witness in any court, should they abuse this picture.