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Xandros buys Linspire – What does it mean for Linux?
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| Cowpland, and Corel, may have made the classic mistake of realising too early
| where the market was going, and running before the market could walk. Within
| months Cowpland was forced to step down from the company he had founded,
| vowing to devote his time to working with unspecified Linux
| start-ups. "Personally, I intend to get my hands really dirty with a lot of
| Linux technology," he told reporters. "I'm fascinated by the potential that's
| now emerging."
|
| He was replaced as CEO by Corel's chief technology officer, Derek
| Burney. "Open-source software isn't a moneymaker", said
| Burney, "Microsoft's .Net strategy will change computing as we know it."
|
| By this time, Microsoft, which had an interest in keeping WordPerfect afloat
| for antitrust reasons, had invested $135 million in Corel. According to
| Burney: "There is a contract that says we have to put the .Net framework into
| our major applications within six months of the release of .Net."
|
| Shortly thereafter, Corel divested itself of its Linux distribution, and
| discontinued support for WordPerfect and CorelDraw on Linux. It has been
| assumed by many that this was an unwritten condition of Microsoft's
| investment in Corel.
|
| In August 2001, Xandros Incorporated announced that it had secured the rights
| to Corel's Linux distribution and a US$10 million investment from Linux
| Global Partners, a Venture Capital firm. Like Corel, Xandros has its roots in
| Ottawa, Canada, and retained the majority of Corel's original Linux software
| development team. Linux Global Partners also invested heavily in other Linux
| companies, the best known of which are probably CodeWeavers and Ximian
| (before it was sold to Novell).
|
| [...]
|
| The biggest problem for Xandros and Linspire has been the "patent covenants"
| that both companies signed with Microsoft, and the detrimental effect that
| these agreements have had on ongoing relationships with the Linux user and
| developer communities.
|
| Jeremy Allison of Samba made the point when he resigned from Novell over the
| same issue. "Whilst the Microsoft patent agreement is in place there is
| nothing we can do to fix community relations. And I really mean nothing," he
| wrote. "Until the patent provision is revoked, we are pariahs....
| Unfortunately the time I am willing to wait for this agreement to be
| changed... has passed, and so I must say goodbye."
|
| [...]
|
| To which, Alan Cox, the best known of Linux kernel developers after Linus
| Torvalds, replied: "That would be because we believe in Free Software and
| doing the right thing (a practice you appear to have given up on). Maybe it
| is time the term 'open source' also did the decent thing and died out with
| you."
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http://www.itpro.co.uk/604461/xandros-buys-linspire-what-does-it-mean-for-linux
Microsoft did this with Apple as well. It essentially bribes rivals to stop
competing. Apple quit the dependency to an extent.
Related:
Novell, ODF and Castles in the Sand
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| ....what I really see here is a circle of legitimacy of ODF that
| continues to widen, with more bridges being built all the time
| between ODF software packages ? and more importantly, between
| ODF-compliant software users and users of other software. More
| and more vendors are concluding that they can't avoid making ODF
| functionality available to their customers, and also that they
| need to make it more and more easy for ODF-formatted documents to
| coexist easily in a world that is transitioning away from
| proprietary software and documents based on proprietary formats.
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http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?story=2006120505160143
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