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Lindows' Heavy Hand Leads to Summit Dropouts
shawk writes "With Lindows becoming more popular the company's confidence seems to be growing. According to a news item on Desktoplinux.com Lindows unilaterally adjusted the agenda of a planned vendor-neutral summit in a way that is not tolerable for others supporting the conference.
A related article on CNET reports HP having withdrawn from the summit as well."
A little bit of conventional wisdom: alienating your developers is a Bad Idea.
Any source code yet? Is Lindows stealing from open source programers?
...before a fall (whu is it spelled "goeth"?)
:)
I really think Lindows is going to lose the trademark tussle with Microsoft over the name. Not only does Microsoft have nearly infinite legal resources, but I think here they may actually be right (and that's from a Mac user). Unless they've lost control of the windows name themselves, entirely possible from what I've heard -- Microsoft has no lack of hubris and is overdue for a stumble or more.
Good think Apple never got arrogant. Oh, wait.... But they felll big time, and I think it was a good thing, if only because it drew Jobs back like the second coming, and vested him with unilateral power to match. He's proud but smart. Like Gates. If their positions were reversed, hmmm....
Stop chuckling Linux-heads. Power/pride corrupts, your turn may come.
A lot of people are rushing to judgement on this story. Wait until the dust settles and see what comes of it.
Too many posts I have seen are obviously colored by the posters opinion rather than any known facts.
This doesn't seem all that out of place to me. Lindows never really seemed to have the true Linux spirit. I really wanted to try their product but not for $99, when I could have gotten a better but now defunct Mandrake distro for free. Of course this is taking for granted that the changes they made were terrible, but the article gives very little mention of what specific changes were made. Besides the change of the keynote speaker no mention is made of what other things were changed. For all I know they changed the break treats to peanuts from sweet rolls. Yeah it was dumb of Lindows to do this without any kind of forewarning, but to pull out of the conference completely? I think both parties are a bit at fault here.
Hold up, wait a minute, let me put some pimpin in it
This isn't just alienating developers. It's alienating the whole Linux community, including users, OSS contributors, commercial entities. These people and organisations are working in a cooperative way to achieve (at this time anyhow) related goals. Backing Linux for many organisations, especially commercial ones, can be considered risky. Linux is far less accepted on the desktop, and it is likely that within organisations that are supporting linux, there are strong camps that are opposing or only luke-warm towards it. This action by Lindows is going to give ammunition to the anti-Linux factions, and specifically from Lindows' point of view, destroy trust that is so important to strategic relationships.
I think Lindows is on the shortcut to loserville with the Linux community at large. At many different times they've seemed to take the fruits of what Linux users and developers have contributed to the system as a whole and then turned right around and mooned them. At every opertunity Michael Robertson has seen fit to present his ass to the public which his company relies on for their product development. I'd much rather hear Bruce Perens wax philosophic about Linux and Open Source than hear Mike R. pimp Lindows.
One thing that has bothered me a lot about Lindows is the fact they charge $99 for a subscription to their software distribution service (apt-get). It doesn't bother me they are selling a subscription service at all, the thing that gets to me is they are using the public Debian servers and not providing their own. People pay $99 to access a service Lindows has absolutely no afiliation with and does not seem to support in the slightest. The only program repository I can actually find that they house themselves is their FTP site with their patches and whatnot on it.
Lindows is the MP3.com of the Linux world. It is riding the Linux hype wave as far as it can while shafting anyone contributing to it. Where MP3.com shafted the artists providing the site's content, Lindows is shafting the Linux developer providing the distro's content. Where MP3.com has horrible contractual terms Lindows pillages public servers and donation funded development efforts.
Hopefully Lindows will decide to play nice as a community member which they become by default when entering the Linux distro business. There is a Linux community that exists, it isn't just open source zealot preach talk. Companies wanting to interact with this community need to follow its often times quirky social rules and behave as proper community members. I don't really see Lindows doing this at all. It's a shame seeing them pull this stuff because there's a lot of people who will never know the difference between Lindows and any other distro, they'd be hard pressed to tell you why Lindows is not the same as Windows. All these people will do is make Lindows successful at the cost of the people developing Linux software or housing it for distribution.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Lindows is pre-installed on computers sold at WalMart aimed at people looking for the cheapest possible new computer.
For the most part...
Those people don't chat on IRC
They don't even know what a mailing list is
They are not going to be visiting technical sites for pleasure
Many of these people aren't even going to know what "Linux" is.
That's the point!
Lindows has always given me a little bit of a bad feeling, but I've never really been able to identify anything really wrong with them. Sure, the CEO does some weird things, and even makes some people mad. But whatever they do doesn't even compare to many other businesses from which we buy software.
Beyond that, Linodws is a good distribution. Very easy install, and sensible defaults for an ex-windows user. More importantly, debian lies beneath the whole thing, and the debian servers are (by default) set in sources.list. That means you have everything a world-class server distro has, yet a nice interface for a beginner.
I administer some servers, and recently one of my coworkers decided to really get linux installed. I recommended lindows because it is easy to install, and sure enough, he got it up and running. I also offered Mandrake as an alternative, but it was just a little more difficult to work with and install new software. Also, I didn't know enough about RPM to help him out.
The $99 click-n-run service seems like a perfectly acceptable business model to me. It's working for my coworker, and doesn't even slow down the way I might go about installing software (apt-get). I would probably change it to run as a non-root user also, but a new user probably finds it easiest to just use root. Lindows is not too insecure, I might add, because it doesn't install all kinds of servers.
I wouldn't choose lindows for myself, but it seems like a damn good way to get started to me.
Social scientists are inspired by theories; scientists are humbled by facts.
Seems to me that Michael Robertson is the one person who understands where the real fight is here. He's the one person I see who has the balls to take on MS and doesn't back down.
Shame he has to fight with all those arrows from the Linux community in his back.
It's like he's trying to drag Linux into the next generation, the next wave, the next level with the masses, and Linux is kicking and screaming "We don't want to go!"
Sid
Whoever thinks that Michael Robertson is of a calibre to replace Bruce Perens as a keynote speaker on a supposidely 'vendor independent' Linux conference, is a clueless jackass.
Mod me down more, that won't change a bit.
FOCUS will not happen in the Free Software/Open Source/Linux world.
Free Software is "pure" democracy brought to the software world. Anyone can disagree and chances are someone will, with anything anyone does for any of a myriad of reasons. By operation and definition, disagreements will break out.
-Don't like the way that feature works, change it.
-Don't like the way that distro/company operates, go to someone else.
-Don't like the way you LUG operates, make your own.
The software freedom infuses and empowers the people who use it. It gives them the power to disagree. And, given the power, we use it and sometime or another!
It is also the most free and open market I have ever been part of. No one can hold all the cards. The only reason that the Microsoft empire has focus is because Microsoft holds all the cards.
Does this make it hard to provide a cohesive, polished, united front to the mass market? YEP! Would I want it the other way? NOPE and NO WAY! The power of the freedom will eventually sell itself but it does not fit into the quick results marketing models. The freedom we are riding will get bigger and bigger and will provide a bumpy, interesting ride but in the end will create the best software possible because all the possibilities will be tried by someone!
Lindows really doesn't care if it alienates the Linux community. The attitude is one of "okay, thanks for the thousands of hours of work developing the backbone of the system guys, we'll take it from here, now get lost." The only times Lindows expresses interest in the welfare of the whole community are those times when it will benefit Lindows at least as much as it benefits anyone else. Michael Robertson, while a very charismatic and engaging speaker, is a smooth talking freeloader. Open Source vs. Microsoft, just like MP3 vs. RIAA, is just another easy ride to glory and riches. A while after Lindows becomes profitable, I bet Michael Robertson would sell it to the highest bidder (probably AOL). The really scary thing about Lindows is, Michael Robertson might have as much as $300 million dollars in cash and stock from the MP3.com buyout. Lindows believes that they will win because they've got the dough, and because the marketing+sales department is probably as big as the engineering department. I'm afraid that, because of this, the general public might begin to think LinuxLindowsAOL, just like they currently think PC"Pentinum"Microsoft.
Now that I've really ripped on Lindows.com, I really have to say that LindowsOS itself is pretty darn easy to use. Click-N-Run is great for installing software. The OS installation really takes less than 10 minutes on my Duron 850 and my XP1800+. But, that far from makes up for the careless treatment of the community.
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