IT WAS bad enough when ASUS did it with Express Gate and now we discover that Xandros is pretty much the same despite being a (supposedly) "Linux company", which ASUS is not (Microsoft just won't let it be, ever). Xandros says you need Windows XP and Vista in order to install Presto. It is a .EXE file which puts an Xfce-based desktop on people's machines. In the following new video, a Xandros representative also says: "we don't like the advertise the Linux because it scares people." The distribution they put together contains proprietary software/spyware like RealPlayer, which is preinstalled. Is this not a gross GPL violation? They also incorporate sharing of files with Windows, but nothing equivalent for GNU/Linux.

It's worth reminding ourselves that Xandros signed a patent deal with Microsoft and soon became its vassal in the sense that it promoted Microsoft patents and publicly offered pseudo-support for OOXML when Microsoft needed to ram it down ISO's throat using corruption.

Companies like Novell and Xandros are very problematic. Here is Microsoft successfully using Silverlight to suppress GNU/Linux adoption on the desktop. Novell is the single biggest promoter of the illusion that Silverlight content works with GNU/Linux, which it does not; it's not intended to, but it leads to false marketing. Microsoft uses Silverlight (with Novell's help) for retardation of GNU/Linux desktops, making them inadequate for some Web use, just like ActiveX. ⬆