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Xandros Reportedly Buys Out Linspire
2muchcoffeeman writes "Former Linspire president and CEO Kevin Carmony — whose relationship with his former employer has turned acrimonious, to say the least — reported on his blog that Xandros and Linspire signed an agreement in principle for Xandros to buy Linspire June 19. Carmony includes a scan of the memo to Linspire shareholders announcing the deal, which requires the former Linspire company to change its name. According to the memo, the stockholders voted to change the company's name to Digital Cornerstone, Inc. Despite the wording of the Linspire memo to stockholders, this deal apparently came as a surprise to Carmony and other stockholders. Some here may remember that both Xandros and Linspire signed patent protection deals with Microsoft in 2007."
I think Linspire users must be as rare as hen's teeth, I've certainly never even heard of a single person using it, other than the guy who reviewed it for distrowatch. Same goes for Xandros. though I did download that one once to check it out with a windows-stranded friend in mind, but saw no advantage over Ubuntu.
Come to think of it, who the heck is eweek?
Caveat Utilitor
Never liked them much. Xandros is on the way out too. Only thing it has at the moment is that it's shipped on the Eee PC by default (apart from XP). But Given that people then stick their own flavour of Linux on an Eee (Like Ubuntu). Once the UMPC version of Ubuntu is release,d it might take over Xandros's place on the Eee PC's
Laters Sol "Have you found the secrets of the universe? Asked Zebade "I'm sure I left them here somewhere"
Infoworld and eWeek were the computer tabloids that wished they were Byte or even Compute!, they had more articles that shilled products than they had neutral articles if you could find one. Most editors and writers got bribed by computer companies to write a good article on their product in exchange for keeping the product plus other gifts.
Spencer the Cat was the gossip guy, but around 2000 his gossip columns became more advertising and less rumor. I think when he made a prediction that Microsoft would switch to a Xenix clone named Winix to compete with Linux was when he lost his mojo back during the Clinton Administration and Dotcom busts that made gossip and rumor columns had to get info so they started to make stuff up.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
I remember the days when PC magazine was a good magazine. It had reviews, technical howto articles and did decent reviews. I still remember the war between Windows and OS/2. As Microsoft became the only player in town, the magazine stopped being "PC magazine" and became "Windows magazine". Then it went all downhill.
Precisely. I never expected Linspire to succeed, partly because of what they were trying to do, and partly because of who it was that was trying to do it, and partly because of when they were trying to do it - long after the ship for Yet Another Proprietary Linux Distro had already sailed.
Xandros had, in their day, a better shot at what they were trying to do. When Xandros came out, they put some user-friendly wrappings around Debian and took extra care to make it integrate easily and well into a Windows network. The problems they face, as I see it, were:
1) Xandros was too expensive.
2) Very slow release cycle. Xandros releases tend to come so far apart they make Debian look downright speedy.
3) They had proprietary bits, and that tends to make you unpopular with much of the Linux community.
I actually spent a little time with Xandros; my dad had bought a copy of it. Xandros has a lot going for it, but I found it to be inflexible, in large part because of the aforementioned slow release cycle. They were way behind pretty much everyone, and you couldn't point Xandros at some other repositories and bring it up to date without breaking all sorts of stuff. If Xandros had been on the kind of aggressive release cycle that Ubuntu has followed, they might well have been a major success, even allowing for points 1 and 3.