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LinuxOne Plans Merger, But Shows Few Signs Of Life
An unnamed correspondent points to this NewsForge article by the esteemed Grant Gross about the ongoing saga of LinuxOne, the long-beleaguered and much-abused phantom Linux vendor. Anyone else have light to shed on this story? You may also be interested in reading earlier stories about LinuxOne.
It kind of blows my mind that you can for all intents and purposes publically plan fraud on a massive scale and keep the ball rolling with a shell company with no products or revenues for as long as they have without winding up in jail. It's like those pyramid schemes spams you get which always claim to be legal. I assume they consider legal "Not getting caught." So why hasn't this guy been caught?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I did a quick traceroute to france.linuxone.net (to see if I could guess where their server was, geographically).
It started with this:
bash-2.03$ traceroute france.linuxone.nettraceroute to ram.linuxopen.com (216.101.248.93)
("ram.linuxopen.com?" The whois entry for this says it's registered to LinuxOne, inc. - are they planning to change their name to confuse people?) It [the traceroute] ended with this:
12 core4-g2-0.snfc21.pbi.net (209.232.130.77) 39.969 ms 38.057 ms 37.433 ms
13 rback3-fe2-0.snfc21.pbi.net (206.171.134.134) 41.637 ms 49.016 ms 50.158 ms
14 * adsl-216-101-248-93.dsl.snfc21.pacbell.net (216.101.248.93) 2559.41 ms 2972.05 ms
Is "snfc21" in San Francisco?
(Or does pacbell.net have adsl available somehwere in France?)
I was also under the vague impression (I could be wrong about this) that pacbell's Terms of Service for their adsl lines involved not running servers...Is LinuxOne busted? (That'd be pretty funny, after the hassle they gave the reporter about his Yahoo account Terms of Service...)
Well, I thought it was kind of funny, anyway...
A vote for the lesser of two evils is still a vote for Evil.
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Anyone who knows anything about Linux immediately associates "LinuxOne" with "Sleazy fly-by-night scam from Hong Kong".
You'd have to be nuts to merge with them and acquire the stench of scandal. The people that started this to begin with are stupid to think that anyone would fall for it after the Linux tulip bulb mania.
I never thought we would hear from them again. Does the LinuxOne distro even exist? If it does, it is anything more than RedHat with no changes other than the name? Does anybody run it?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
This phone transcript is a hoot! Go checkt it out!
My favourite part (the caller asked about the set of applications that come with LinuxOne):
04:18 - LinuxOne: "Ummmm...There's a terminal emulator, a RPM manager called KPackage."
04:25 - Accipiter: "What is RPM?"
04:26 - LinuxOne: "RPM is uh, the program language that you program uh, within Linux."
04:33 - Accipiter: "Oh, so you can actually make programs with RPM?"
04:35 - LinuxOne: "Yes, it's a C++ programming, uh, programming tool."
04:38 - Accipiter: "Oh! Very cool..."
04:40 - LinuxOne: "Uhhmmm... A --"
04:42 - Accipiter: "Does that include a compiler so if I want to...if I write my - if I write my program in RPM, I can compile it with RPM too?"
04:49 - LinuxOne: "Yes."
04:49 - Accipiter: "Oh, Great!"
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You may like my a cappella music
Linuxone has hopefully trained their phone staff since then...
(there used to be an MP3 of the phone call somewhere...)
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Let's see:
Still no products that anyone uses.
Still no IPO.
Still no business plan.
Still no legitimacy.
This is an interesting article and all about a true fly-by-night company without a clue, but I'd forgotten about LinuxOne, and realized how happy I was about that fact when I saw the name "LinuxOne" on the front page. Please, why give these jokers any kind of exposure? The only place I want to see the name "LinuxOne" is in the FuckedCompany Hall of Fame.
I'd say the "AI Info Bot"'s reply to Gross' first e-mail says enough about how much attention this company really wants, or deserves.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
The NewsForge article is definitely worth a read; it's an example of some very fine investigative reporting and is entertaining as well (particularly if you were following the earlier LinuxOne news over the last year and a half).
:-)
This ``Micrometix'' company which is supposedly planning a merger with LinuxOne seems rather shady itself, eh?