LinuxDevices.com Vanishes From the Web

DeviceGuru writes "Embedded Linux pioneer LinuxDevices.com departed from the web earlier this week. The site became a collateral casualty of the aquisition of eWEEK by Quinstreet in February 2012, as part of a bundle of Ziff Davis Enterprise assets. Quinstreet immediately fired all the LinuxDevices staffers and ceased maintaining the site. A few days ago, the site's plug was finally pulled and it is now gone from the Web, save for a few pages on the WayBack Machine. For more than a decade, LinuxDevices played a pivotal role in serving and fostering an emerging embedded Linux ecosystem, and it was well respected by the embedded Linux community at the time it was acquired by QuinStreet. Unfortunately, the site did not mesh well with QuinStreet's B2B market focus. Fortunately, its spirit remains alive and well at LinuxGizmos.com, a site recently launched by LinuxDevices founder Rick Lehrbaum."

Comments

LinuxGIsmos is fine but

[FudRucker]

what about Linux Gadgets, wont somebody think of the gadgets!!!

Re:LinuxGIsmos is fine but

[Chas]

Pfft.

Widgets forever!

You and your pansy little girly-gadgets!

aaand site's offilne

[ThorGod]

Looks like we just /.ed LinuxGizmos.com

AND ... !!

[Anonymous Coward]

Another One Bits the Dust !!

Why simply shut it down? Why not give it back?

[OhANameWhatName]

It was a community website. Okay, so the corporation doesn't have any interest in it, why not give it back to the community?

It seems senseless to shut it down and just 'disappear' it entirely from the interwebs. Why not give the data and the domain to the original site creator and leave him to it? The response of corporations to either:
A. Own it
B. Grind it into the dust
Is destroying the very environment in which corporations flourish. Chew up the competitors, spit them out then buy up anything new which is created in their wake. Most corporations are like big dumb 5 year olds, take what they want with no respect for anyone else and if they don't like it, drop it .. never admit their mistake and never look back.

Re:Why simply shut it down? Why not give it back?

[hairyfeet]

Sadly as somebody who dealt with too damned many of those corps when I tried to bring a way for those old shareware titles to be played on modern systems their attitude basically is "If I can't make a shitload of money off it I'll destroy it, because if somebody figures out how to make a cent on it I'll look stupid".

Its a damned shame but at least from what I saw that is the attitude, they would rather something die out than let anybody possibly make a single cent off of it.

Re:Why simply shut it down? Why not give it back?

[bill_mcgonigle]

Most corporations are like big dumb 5 year olds, take what they want with no respect for anyone else and if they don't like it, drop it .. never admit their mistake and never look back.

Both five year olds and corporations have limitations on liability for their poor behaviors. In the case of the five year old, the goal is to get him out of that behavior as soon as possible. In the case of corporations, the goal is to encourage that behavior. The losses society suffers for it are converted into corporate tax revenue for the government - that's why it creates and encourages them.

Re:Why simply shut it down? Why not give it back?

[gandhi_2]

1. Start something.
2. Get bought.
3. Jump ship and start the same thing under a different name.
3a. Let old thing get burned. Waste time and money of whoever bought it.
4. Profit. !

The dude should build up LinuxGizmos till QuinStreet falls for it again. Just hire all the people who get fired each time.

Re:Why simply shut it down? Why not give it back?

[NormalVisual]

they would rather something die out than let anybody possibly make a single cent off of it.

Even beyond that, they'll be damned if anybody uses it for free without *them* making something off of it, even when it's a legacy product that has no marketing potential whatsoever. This is part of why copyright law is so screwed up right now - lots of companies work very hard to ensure that nothing they produce ever becomes public domain where it could be freely used by others, which was the entire point of copyright to begin with.

Re:Why simply shut it down? Why not give it back?

[stefanb]

are converted into corporate tax revenue for the government

Hahaha, that's a good one!

Re:Why simply shut it down? Why not give it back?

[Anonymous Coward]

according to taxpolicycenter.org, corporate taxes accounted for 9% of all revenue in fy 2012.

gp's point is pretty valid

Re:Why simply shut it down? Why not give it back?

[Belial6]

I could have sworn that this is pretty much what people were complaining about happening to MySQL.

Re:Why simply shut it down? Why not give it back?

[mabhatter654]

The publisher is about BUSINESS not writing. If it took them more than 5 minutes to understand, then they already lost their attention span. Selling it or spinning it off would require more than 5 minutes to figure out what it was worth and who would want it.
They WANTED other ZD assets to add to their collection and the rest were for the bin. That's how large companies work.

Good Luck Rick!

[interval1066]

I hope he does well with the new site.

Quinstreet lost LinuxDevices archive ..

[dgharmon]

"Despite any recent updates, the vast LinuxDevices news archive continued to serve as a valuable archive of embedded Linux information, history, and memorabilia; but earlier this week, the plug was pulled and LinuxDevices disappeared from the Web"

Quinstreet could restore a lot of goodwill by donating the LinuxDevices news archive to linuxgizmos.com

Having worked at a company acquired by QuinStreet,

[gburgyan]

I have to say that they are quite the arrogant bunch. The company I worked at was Insurance.com. I was there from almost the start back in 2001. QuinStreet acquired them in 2010. I was one of the six folks that were kept on to keep the lights on.

I have no respect for QS. They look at people as chits to cashed in. People are their currency. If you can't monetize someone right now, then the source is ipso facto useless. Mind you, Insurance.com sent out its share of emails (er, spam), but at the same time we had some pretty good voices of the consumer at the table as well -- myself included. QS had none of that.

Beyond the consumer angle, they are a meat grinder for the employees. I met very few folks in my year there that had more than a year or two of tenure. There are a couple people I worked with that were there for years that were waiting to cash out and leave (some have left since then), but they were few and far between.

If anyone wants to know anything, feel free to ask.

Talk about useless

[fnj]

Can somebody please pull Quinstreet's plug? With extreme prejudice. Any outfit that can't comprehensibly explain what they do is pretty bloody useless.