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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A related article on CNET reports HP having withdrawn from the summit as well."
I thought Michael Robertson had changed his ways when he started Lindows. Guess not. This seems to be indication that he's got as much hubris as ever.
Lindows was started with hopes to get big and blast in to the Linux community with open arms.. for the majority of the first year or more not many give them any credit. Now Lindows is signing contracts here or there, putting copies on cheap walmart PC's, and to themselves they are on top of the world right now. Lindows should be careful about stressing things when they are still "so new", as it could seriously proove bad later on.
Here's the question of the day. How does linux takeover the desktop market if it doesn't become corperate in the sense that there is support and advertisement?
Oh no, the evil MP3.com one of the most visited sites on the internet's former CEO is now the CEO of a Linux company, the travisty obviously this man cares not for the community but for his own pocketbook. Yet look at that... Lindows is the new hype word, even beats redhat in most not-in-the-know IT types.
So lindows wants to start its own summit and doesn't want the other vendors to jump on their turf, is this surprising?
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
I see people saying that now Lindows is trying to play like it's a bid bad boy because they are supposedly popular. I want to understand how is that possible. When I browse the web, chat on IRC, participate in mailing lists, I see folk using all kind of distros. I see people using Redhat, Mandrake, Xandros, Debian, Slackware, Gentoo and god-know-what. But what makes me wonder is that I am yet to hear of a SINGLE PERSON actually USING Lindows for purposes other that reviewing.
Can anyone provide any factual numbers of the amounts of Lindows users compared to the likes of Redhat, Debian and the like ? I am very interested.
The fact that when one vendor does something that i dont agree with i can take my business somewhere else without the blink of an eye. I think this is linux biggest strength. You can choose whatever dist you like and still get the same thing but wrapped in another context. No vendor lockin keeps the vendors on their toes and the ones not collaborating dissapears into oblivion or change their ways fast.
HTTP/1.1 400
...the expected attendance is 600 people. Max.
-Rusty
You never know...
"Lindows spokeswoman Cheryl Schwartzman said the company wanted to concentrate on desktop Linux for customers who'll use it, not for programmers who'll develop it." That tells me that Lindows just wants to take from the programmers who make the programs and give them nothing in return. Not even speaking time at a conference. They just want our programs to charge users 99 dollars a year to download them and flip us the bird. Maybe the next program I create will GPLL. Meaning it's GPL'ed less than Lindows. Lindows can't distribute my program or use any of my code. Don't piss on the people that made/makes your product Lindows.
Another bonus about Lycoris over Lindows: a damn fine user community. Oh yeah, and Joseph Cheek isn't an asshole like Michael Robertson is. ;-)
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Did he offer you any money for these features or was he going to keep that for himself?
You're modded down as a troll, but you've got a point. He did offer me money, but they were features I was going to implement anyway, so I turned it down.
-- Wibble
It doesn't appear as if Micheal Robertson and Lindows are exactly embracing the spirit or the letter of Open Source / GPL.
Others have asked whether Lindows complies with the GPL and provides source code. If you happen to have already paid them money and noted the IP address of the FTP server where insiders can download source, then I guess they provide source code. If however you go to http://www.lindows.com/ you will not find a Download button or references to source code. A search for "source code" in the "Warehouse" field takes you a list of things that LOOK like they can be downloaded, but just try it. You get dragged into something called "Click n' Run" that works more like porn web site voting lists, constantly cycling you back to pages where you can buy a download membership for $99 or if you're a programmer, another membership for $299.
If you not have a Click-n-Run membership and you are not already running Lindows OS, then they offer 3 options:
1. Purchase the membership for $99
2. Purchase a PC from WalMart and then sign up for Click-n-Run
3. Join their "Insider Program" for $299
Micheal Robertson's goal appears to be to build a business and make a lot of money by leveraging the hard work of a large number of GPL contributors. That's fine, and it scares Microsoft, which is even better. What troubles me is the direction that Micheal is moving to do it, which sure looks like just another corporate grab of a bunch of free stuff and an unwillingness to give back. I sure hope I'm missing something here.
No, nobody offered me the closing spot. But people from Lindows have been saying a number of things that aren't connected with reality. It's very strange.
My participation in the conference has been publicized for months, so I don't understand how Lindows would not have known that the person they hired to set up the conference had put me in the keynote position. That person is a long-time participant in Linux business whose integrity should not be questioned. And anyway, since she was working for Lindows, if you are to believe them entirely unsupervised for months, they need to take responsibility for the work she did - which had no problem.
Regarding their comments about my public speaking prowess - both Michael and I were on NPR the other day, and the broadcast archive is at sciencefriday.com . Judge for yourself. But they have been saying this about anyone they moved into a panel slot (those are all very short) or otherwise rejected - they seem to all be bad speakers. Most of the people they say the advisory board asked for were moved into panel slots.
We want Lindows on the team, but as a team player. It's their right to hold a party and call all of the shots. But they can't expect us all to come to the party on their terms.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.