Linspire, the company behind the Linspire and Freespire Linux distributions has been bought by its competitor, Xandros. ‘Tis bad business, with former CEO Kevin Carmony getting into a mud-slinging match with founder Michael Robertson. Robertson, who pioneered they very first ‘desktop Linux for normal users’ concept, seems to have fallen for the lust of gold (from the Evil Empire of M$); and given up on his dream. I was rather surprised to know that Linspire’s engineering team consisted of only TEN people! They did make some very promising software – like Nvu, Lsongs, their CNR system, etc – quite a feat with that less people. Also, no wonder Freespire / Linspire release schedules always overshoot their deadline because of such a small team. They were creative, but they were really small.
photo credit: NathanaelBLinspire (the company) will now be called ‘Digital Cornerstone’. Xandros, the buyer, too is a comapny which has been early to the ‘user-friendly Linux’ market, and has carved a niche for itself. It runs on the Asus Eee PC for example, which had garnered rave reviews for its software interface; with reviewers saying “OMG, this is Linux?” The reason for that is that most of these retards (the reviewers) haven’t USED Linux. To the right is the Asus Eee PC, running Xandros. I, for one, have always been supportive of efforts to make Linux more user-friendly – I used Freespire for quite some time myself before getting disgruntled with the irregular release cycle. Hope the new combined Linspire-Xandros entity does well…