Michael Robertson finally broke his silence about what the 100 Linspire shareholders can expect from the sale to Xandros. No, this didn't happen in a shareholder meeting, but to a reporter. Apparently reporters matter more to Michael than shareholders.
The new company will be named Digital Cornerstone Inc. Financial terms of the deal were kept secret.
His comments follow bitter remarks made by the firm’s ex-CEO and Linspire shareholder Kevin Carmony, who revealed earlier this week that a deal between the two Linux companies was underway.
Carmony laid into the takeover by accusing Robertson of being a sell-out and abandoning a “sinking ship”.
One outlet described the deal as Linspire founder Michael Robertson deserting a sinking ship, but others will claim that it was sunk last June when it agreed to join Microsoft’s “IP Protection Racket.”
Gianpiero Morbello, Acer’s Vice President of Marketing and Brand, interviewed by vnunet, said, bluntly, that Acer “has shifted towards Linux because of Microsoft”.
He didn’t elaborate but went on to say, perhaps more importantly, that “Microsoft has a lot of power” which could make things difficult for them but they were nevertheless “determined to develop the Linux market”. That’s pretty bold talk but as the saying goes, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. We’ll have wait and see if they have the stomach for a showdown with Microsoft when the threats start to come. Perhaps they might start backsliding like Asus. In the real world, Microsoft has real power and it has never been slow or afraid to wield it when its commercial interests are threatened.
The HP 2133 is another well spec’d contender but it chose to install SUSE, a Novell product that is being currently boycotted by many in the Unix community because of its link up with……Microsoft.
GigaOM: But will Hyper-V compete with the Citrix server virtualization business anyway?
Crosby: You should look forward to interesting announcements of products to add value to Hyper-V. We’re going to sell into that footprint much like Citrix has always extended the use cases of Microsoft products.
--Richard Stallman