01.16.08
Updates on Turbolinux and Linspire (Mandriva Deal and CNR Status Report)
Novell’s little sisters still making baby steps
Mandriva has already made it very clear that it would not sign a patent deal with Microsoft. It is curious to find though that Mandriva has just joined forces with Turbolinux, which had sold out and showed off its loveaffrair with Microsoft a couple of months ago.
The deal has no troublesome bits contained in the press release. It is a purely technical collaboration that has nothing at all to do with Microsoft technologies, so unlike Scalix, there should be no effect by association.
Turbolinux Noriko Otake, otake@turbolinux.co.jp or International Business Division, +81-3-5766-1142 ib@turbolinux.co.jp or Mandriva Vanessa Wall, +33-(0)1-40-41-97-29 vwall@mandriva.com Mandriva and Turbolinux announce a partnership by creating a lab named: Manbo-Labs. This Lab is the result of an agreement between Mandriva and Turbolinux to share resources and technology to release a common base system on each
of the Linux distributions.
Also in the news, the ‘bread and butter’ of Linspire, namely CNR, has progress to report.
Since the launch of CNR.com beta last month, over 20,000 new CNR users
have downloaded and installed the beta CNR Client. In addition, over
250,000 software programs, packages and libraries were downloaded and
installed at an 89.9% successful installation rate.
This seems like slow progress. The success of Linspire is still pretty much hinged on its ability to distinguish itself or even getting others dependent on its software. CNR is the company’s only real asset. As we were told by someone who knows the company pretty well, it is unlikely that Linspire will survive. Kevin Carmony made a horrible mistake before leaving the company, more latterly hopping on some dating Web site business while boasting and marketing himself as a “Linux CEO”. He seems to be flipping jobs nowadays, not only distros (he tried to become part of Ubuntu). █
Dude said,
January 16, 2008 at 12:16 pm
Roy,
Boycotting Kevin for being an evil CEO is one (good) thing, but dumping on those who have decided to try to make the best of the mess Kevin left behind is a low blow (don’t they have it hard enough already?)
CNR is truly implemented in the spirit of the GPL and open source software. I.e. anyone is free to use the service without even creating an account, the source code for the CNR client and all such open source software is readily available for download and the service revolves around community input and direction.
I for one hope that CNR can find its way out of the hole its been placed in because it is a great service, despite the sins of the previous CEO.
Xanadu said,
January 16, 2008 at 4:02 pm
If the new linspire administration was so good, they would have tried to drop the deal, wouldn’t them?
Xanadu said,
January 16, 2008 at 4:07 pm
I just hope this doesn’t become a new MS-FUD-deal by proxy strategy to be used on other distros.
Roy Schestowitz said,
January 16, 2008 at 6:44 pm
Yes, exactly.
That’s what had me worried. I missed a heartbeat when my feed reader truncated the headline to just show: “Mandriva and Turbolinux Announce a Partnership and…”
Dude said,
January 16, 2008 at 7:55 pm
Good point, IF they could have gotten out of the deal they should have…I am just not sure that is the case because typically the deal is written such that there are big penalties for early termination.
Roy Schestowitz said,
January 16, 2008 at 11:55 pm
Can they ‘fork’ the code and move into a separate empty shell company? I don’t think that would sit well with the company’s founder. Besides, there’s already a defection of Linspire (and Xandros, IIRC) ‘escapees’ who created and now maintain their own distribution. It’s based on Kubuntu as far as I can tell.