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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A related article on CNET reports HP having withdrawn from the summit as well."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.
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.
Any source code yet? Is Lindows stealing from open source programers?
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.
From the company who brought you Lindows, comes Licrosoft like management decisions.
...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.
ZDNet claims that Sun is no longer on the participant list, but they are.
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.
Sorry, but is anyone surprised by this? They even NAMED THEMSELVES after a microsoft product....
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.
actually to be Linux, to use the Linux kernel, or use anything derived from the Linux Kernel, it has to be GPL. Therefore I don't consider it a Linux distribution.
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
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...
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 the question is "Who would admit to using Lindows?", but thats another point. Linux Counter reports that, out of 115,886 submitted values, there are 8 distros in use, none of which are Lindows, which must be in the "Others" department, which takes up 13.13% of the share. Those 8 (in order of usage): Red Hat, Mandrake, Debian, Slackware, SuSE, Conectiva, "diy", and Debian sid. Then again, would your average Lindows user even know or care about something like Linux Counter? -- While you're there, fill out a reg form.
Excuse me, but you should probably do your homework.
The original poster didn't claim that Lindows wasn't distributing source, only that people should look in to it. The idea is valid, as Lindows was known to previously break the GPL by not making source available. They claimed it was only for their "beta" period, but the GPL doesn't allow this in any form.
You, on the other hand, are making something up completely out of the blue. Even if he was stealing gasoline, this has no relevance to the point the oringal poster was trying to make. Lindows not distributing source code, on the other hand, is directly related to Lindows not being a team player, which is the point of the article the comment was made on.
Saying people are making logical falicies by making a logical falicy is rather hypocritical, in my mind -- and just bad form, too.
"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.
I asked a question. I made no accusations. However, if you'd like me to justify even posing question, Lindows has violated the GPL in the past: http://www.lindowsos.info/print.php?sid=16
If you use Galeon, you can block ads from Microsoft.
And the press is free to call attention to it, and we're free to criticize it. You don't like it, move to North Korea.
You have no idea how deeply this offends all us other Michael Robertson's. We would like to issue a collective apology for our kinsman, who seems to have given us a a bad name. Appropriate actions will be taken to silence him. -Michael Robertson
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.
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.
They had better watch who they step on...
And if I were them, I'd start calling it GNU/Lindows, for their sake.
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!
I was scheduled to give a talk on "The Kernel and the Desktop" at the Desktop Linux Summit and I formally withdrew on Thursday after having a discussion with the involved parties due to the issues discussed in these news articles. The behavior shown - especially the treatment of Bruce - is not acceptable.
I, uh, bet there will be more dropouts over the next couple days - Lindows is not cool.
Back when lindows started I subscribed to the insiders program. I was wholly unimpressed with Lindows as a whole. Then the big lawsuit from Microsoft came down and Robertson had a reply 'CEO to CEO' to Bill Gates. The reply from Robertson basically stated that he was going to sell Lindows to a discriminated market, and that it would be impossible for people to confuse Windows with Lindows. However, not six months later was Lindows being sold at Wal-Mart, which in my personal and professional opinion is most certainly _not_ an outlet that sells to a discriminated audience. Not to mention later on WinE was removed from the distribution. That's a whole other story however. It just comes as no big shock that Robertson is playing games again later on.
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.
I am a Lindows.com Insider. I have cut and pasted the post the President of Lindows.com made on our forums. Here it is:
We had contracted with one of the employees of Desktoplinux.org (they only have a couple) to pay them to help out with organizing A FEW PARTS of the summit. Without going into great detail, let's just say this relationship ended up being unworkable. Due, perhaps from some bad communication on our part, this person became upset with some of the decisions being made about the summit. (We wanted a consumer, media-friendly event, not a technical, developer's conference.) Based on early misunderstandings, this person unfortunately had made promises to vendors without our final approval and had promised speaking slots. When the agenda came up for final approval (the first time Michael or I even saw it), we made changes to make it have more of a mass-market slant. The changes we made put this person in an awkward position with some people. We told this person that we would take full responsibility for the misunderstandings and to blame us if anyone was disappointed.
In the end, it was simply a bad fit and this person was simply not the appropriate ambassador for the summit as we envisioned it. (It's hard to sell something you yourself don't believe in.) Therefore, we stopped contracting with this individual and used other people who LOVED the summit as we had planned it.
As for this notion of "vendor neutrality," Lindows.com was NOT in anyway trying to turn the Summit into a "Lindows.com Show." Anyone who attended Wineconf or an MP3 Summit (both events also sponsored by Michael) know he's not like that. One look at the agenda and it's pretty obvious this is a show about how COOL LINUX IS ON THE DESKTOP, not about Lindows.com. Besides, Linux is so much more than distros. It's about office suites (Sun), applications (Kompany), printers (HP), tablets (StepUp), Games (Transgaming), hardware (Microtel), and on and on... Lindows.com doesn't even compete with 95% of the vendors at the show. We DO plead guilty that we VERY MUCH were making sure the summit stayed a show with MASS MARKET appeal, but the notion that we wanted to turn it into a Lindows.com show is simply ridiculous. (Go view the wineconf or 4 years of mp3 summit videos to see for yourself.)
This is the sort of wacky "drama" that has plagued Linux for far too long and makes Microsoft laugh at Linux. Fortunately we, as we always do, will remain above this. The only reason I'm even making this post is because this thread asked for a response.
We'll have a packed house and it's going to be a great show. If you look at the agenda, you'll see it's the interesting, consumer-focused type of show Linux needs to start moving into the mainstream markets.
Kevin
I am a Lindows Member too... and here is some more information that was given after the post above:
r berianc ke s
Here's an update on the latest with the Summit...
As of this evening, the following changes have been confirmed to the Summit's sponsor/exhibitor list:
Deletions:
- HP
- Questnet
- the Kompany
Additions:
-Epson
-Earthlink
-Bitstream
-Ce
-CentralCommand
-Hancom
-GridIQ
-Brobe
-SpeakEasy
-MP3.com
-Photogenics
-GarageGam
As for the issue with the Keynote. Michael was ALWAYS slated to be the Keynote. It was this person from desktoplinux.org who promised it to Bruce Perens. (Michael and I had no idea about this!) It was NOT Michael who insisted HE be the Keynote speaker. That was ME! I have heard Michael speak on several occasions and I have also heard Bruce Perens. No offense to Bruce, but he's just not a very dynamic public speaker, ESPECIALLY for a consumer-type conference. As I have said, this summit is about the ability for Linux to move to the mass markets. I think everyone will agree, that is Michael Robertson's area of expertise, not Bruce's. I can't think of anyone who has championed the ideal of taking Linux to the masses more than Michael. He has the arrows in his back from the traditional Linux crowd to prove it! Bruce fired a few more in this week. =)
For the record, we offered Bruce the prime spot of closing the summit, but he said he didn't want to speak at all. That was his choice.
Michael Robertson was always the Keynote speaker at the annual MP3 Summit's, and did a great job. These summits were always very successful and no one ever accused MP3.com of not being fair to the many other vendors who attended the MP3 Summits.
Finally, of the 25 speakers suggested to us by the "panel," (Michael and I didn't even know there WAS such a panel!) we included 19.
As is obvious from the above changes, the show is only growing in status and support, not dwindling.
Kevin
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
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.
This is why Microsoft is not worried about Linux in the short-term. The members of the Linux community are busy fighting themselves while heading in no clear direction. I've heard it said that: "Lindows is A choice... not THE choice". There are lots of distros to choose from. If you don't like Lindows -- fine! Don't run it. But, what good does it do to attack Lindows (another Linux distro) when everyday Microsoft sells more operating systems than anyone on the planet?
Who cares if distro ABC is better than distro XYZ!?!? Why do we have to constantly fight ourselves. The only way that Linux will ever go mainstream is by focusing on the needs of end users. Who cares what other distros think? Who cares what other developers think? The goal is to get the end users to switch to Linux! If we continue to fight about petty bullshit this will never happen. And Microsoft is laughing all the way to the bank.
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.
Mandrake says they get a bigger "cut" from Mandrake Club memberships than they do from the boxed product.
.ISO's, I would never have gone through the trouble to install it.
If there were no
Not having installed it, I wouldn't have felt the need to give anything back by "joining".
So, I get to do easy installations, they get their money, this is a bad thing?
Of course, it remains to be seen whether relying on others' sense of duty is a sustainable business model, but I hope it does.
That only tells you who is going to go there and do that, and its a rather slow indication of the popularity of a distro because of how popularity takes hold. Also, some distros are going to have more zealots than others ("Everybody! Go to linuxcounter and prove to the world that our distro is the most popular!").
A faster indication is from distrowatch. The difference here is that the number of people INTERESTED in the distro determine the popularity.
Here's their actual stats (and though I hate to admit it, Lindows is holding strong at #9).
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
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.
This is very interesting. Just yesterday Ira Flatow had both Bruce Perens and Michael Robertson on his show, Science Friday . Bruce is actually a pretty cool guy, I expected him to be more militant and opinionated for some reason. He kind of reminds me of Emo Phillips.
_ 011703.html
Bruce made a very artful dodge when asked whether Lindows was any good. He basically acknowledged that it was good to have another group working on making Linux better but he diplomatically avoided saying anything good about Lindows.
You can listen to the show in Real format here: http://www.sciencefriday.com/pages/2003/Jan/hour1
Michael Robertson has practiced tech-witchcraft for years, this is just the most recent example.
The basic facts of this story are clear as day... Michael Robertson wanted to hold a conference, but he knew if he held it himself nobody would show up. So, he partners with a Linux news site that prides itself in maintaining indepenace from any specific vendor. That news site demands that they have a say in the control of the agenda if they are going to lend their credibility, and he agress. They draw up an agreed upon agenda... then suddenly Michael Robertson decides he wants to substitute one where he's the keynote. News site is now crying foul play as it pulls out, and several other participants are rethinking their plans as one-by-one others pull out. The only dust left to settle deals with who's still in and who's out.
It might not be illegal, but it's certainly a mean thing to do. He's basically burning his credibilty with some major Open Source supporters all in exchange for the right to be keynote speaker at a trumped-up conference. It shows how little respect he has the Open Source community... and thefore the community doesn't like him much either.
He's soiled his reputation with past bad acts, and this just added to the list.
I use LindowsOS about 50% of the time. It's not as bad as people make it out to be. I bet a lot of these folks haven't even tried using it. It is stable and is mainly Debian. Lindows has made some tweaks to KDE but, the Click-N-Run is a nice feature. I think the entire Linux community should agree on a packaging/installation system! It is terribly complex for non-technical users. I can do things in the console or I can stay in KDE... so, I'm pretty happy with it. The installer is excellent and the hardware detection is pretty good. I've had a few small problems but was able to find solutions pretty fast because Debian is a popular distro. I don't regret spending the money on it. I hope Linux on the desktop really does take off! I support Xandros too and I have it running on my other machine.
Wrong answer, Mike. Politics be damned, this is all about philosophy.
This statement from Roberston is very revealing. It says (to me) that beancounters are beginning to invade the GNU/Linux movement. Props to Bruce Perens and HP for refusing to support the philosophy that equates GNU/Linux users to mindless consumers in the name of winning the desktop war.
Am I alone in my belief that the problem is uneducated, uninformed, apathetic computer users?
--K.
Sig: Bad people happen. Try to avoid being one of them.
The originals for those postings are here on Lindows.com's bulletin board. They come from Kevin Carmody, Lindows.com's president. That he wrote this stuff boggles my mind, but he wrote it.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
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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They have their own, security-controlled repository at http://software.lindows.com/ (the repository appears empty until a properly authenticated Click-N-Run request is received, at which point the server gives only the files needed for that install).
If you're going to bash someone, at least get the facts straight. CNR version 0.90 might've used Debian's servers, but that was an alpha test version. Version 3.0 is very very very different.
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