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 A related article on CNET reports HP having withdrawn from the summit as well."

Comments

Oooookay....

[GearheadX]

A little bit of conventional wisdom: alienating your developers is a Bad Idea.

Re:Oooookay....

[AxelTorvalds]

As we become a more sophisticated community and our products become more sophisticated we will have to constantly be on the watch for this stuff. It's part of the deal.

Anyone remember LinuxOne? I don't know about you guys but I just get a sleazy feeling from Lindows, the same kind of vibe I got from LinuxOne. How about Loki? I'm not trying to lump Loki in with them per se, there were some good guys that worked there but the company, the CEO, were on the sleezier side of things. I think they are a bit more honest than LinuxOne but I don't think that they are looking to do anything other than make a quick buck. This conference thing is just what I'd expect from them; now I could be wrong and maybe Bruce couldn't speak or something like that but it sounds underhanded.

It's just something as a community we're going to need to watch, especially if we want to stay a community. I don't know how many times I've heard Redhat descibed as the next redmond or how they're taking over the world with blue curve and bucking; the truth is Redhat has been walking the walk as much as talking the talk and giving a lot back. They still have one of the most free (libre) distributions out there. We need to keep outselves honest and we need to support the community and the companies that benefit it. Maybe it's time for some kind of Linux community watch effort. Like a website where we could post information about companies in this space and what they've given to the community vs. what they've taken and how they've interacted. I know that stuff is hard to do but some kind of self policing might be useful.

There isn't anything wrong exactly with taking from the community but when a company like MandrakeSoft is on the ropes and a company like Lindows is screwing over other people in the community to push their own message and agenda we need to tell them how to behave with our pocket books. If you're going to pay for a Linux this year, think hard about grabbing a copy of Mandrake and avoid Lindows. Let them take on MS by themselves and see how much they need the community to help them.

Re:Oooookay....

[ToasterTester]

The problem is there appears to be more interest in the Free Beer aspect of Linux versus Freedom. Mandrake is a perfect example they contribute a lot to Linux, but how many people are buying a distro to help support the company and the OSS programmers they hire. Software has value and people should pay for software in some way. Sweat equitity via codeing, QA, documentation, tech notes, or paying what they can afford by buying distro or contributing.

Mandrake should do like OpenBSD and not make ISO images available. They tell people to help suppost OpenBSD by purchasing a distro. If you won't buy OpenBSD then you can download all the files and roll your own CD-ROMS. I think that is very fair.

First things first

[Henry V .009]

Any source code yet? Is Lindows stealing from open source programers?

Pride goeth...

[MacAndrew]

...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. :)

Re:Not just that

[chr1sb]

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.

Why use washable ink?

[Graymalkin]

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.

Lindows is a good distribution

[jadavis]

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.