Let's set the record straight. Linspire is over. The way it was finished is an embellishment. They call it an acquisition [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7], but with a sale of all assets, it's more like a liquidation. Wishful thinkers realise that Freespire won't be buried overnight. Well, the same goes for Windows XP, right? But does that mean that Windows XP will make a comeback? It's a rhetorical question.
Goodbye, Linspire (at least as a standalone company). And thank you to Xandros for funding a market consolidation that’s badly needed. The VAR Guy applauds customer choice and open source.
The Xandros OS is a horrible show of what Linux could do, it actually makes peopel turn away and choose the nicer-looking XP, even though everyone knows Linux could look and perform much better. Putting this aside, I think that a merged distro would be in order to challenge the other major distributions and finally secure a good place for Xandros + Linspire in the top 5. Is it doable? I don’t know. But if they don’t do something real fast, the others are going to run them over and everybody will forget Xandros or Linspire ever existed…
“Linspire was a patent deal nuisance just like Xandros and it loses access to GPLv3-ed software (no grandfathering).”Linspire was a patent deal nuisance just like Xandros and it loses access to GPLv3-ed software (no grandfathering). None of these two will be missed and, over time, Novell becomes more of a Microsoft subsidiary whose role is to stomp on players like Ubuntu, Mandriva, and Red Hat. They do this using paid-for protocols, virtualisation, partners like SAP, and FUD. We've covered this before.
Avoid all distributions that play the software patents game with Microsoft, namely: Novell, Turbolinux, and Xandros. On top of that, avoid gadgets from LG, Samsung, and Fuji Xerox. ⬆