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Talk With Michael Robertson
Lindows CEO Michael Robertson is vilified by many Linux advocates. At the same time, he is probably drawing more attention to desktop Linux than anyone else in the world. Is he evil? Or is he just a typical American businessman trying to make it big (for the second time; before Lindows, he founded -- and later sold -- MP3.com)? One thing is for sure: Unlike many CEOs, he'll give a plain-talk answer to a straight question. We'll send 10 of the highest-moderated questions submitted here by Slashdot readers to Robertson tomorrow, and run his answers, unedited, as soon as he gets them back to us.
Linux does have viruses, and Lindows in particular runs the desktop as root by default. Lindows is much more likely to become infected by a virus than a Linux system configured with limited user accounts.
My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!
The GPL states that the source code be available to anyone who receives a binary copy of the source, not the general public as a whole. If you buy Lindows, you can get the source code from their "my.lindows.com" page.
"People that quote themselves in their signatures bother me" - athakur999
This is just wrong. Please don't waste a question on this. Do your research.
You don't understand the GPL, which says nothing about using the internet to distribute source code. Lindows.com is perfectly within the GPL - they distribute the source code to those that pay for the compiled binaries and choose to download it, which satisfies all the GPL requires. You just can't hold your source for ransom.
We don't need to bother Robertson with this crap, you can get the answers yourself at http://www.fsf.org/copyleft/copyleft.html or http://www.lindows.com.