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Surprises

by Michael Ho

Thu, Jun 10th 2004 11:45pm





But Wait, There's More. Three Linux Distros With Lindows

from the Lindows,-shmindows dept

Apparently having gotten over the whole "what's-our-name" thing, Lindows has come up with a little surprise. In addition to Linspire, two other Linux distributions -- Fedora and Mandrake -- are going to be packaged together with the Lindows distribution. According to the Lindows president, they want to encourage their customers to compare their product to the other distributions of Linux. Why include three competing versions? One could assume: because competition is good for innovation. If more options are better, then what better way to demonstrate the value of a product than by letting the customer decide? However, some people have completely missed the point, as evidenced by one of the quotes in the article: "Who is going to pay money to download three Linux distributions?" It sounds ridiculous to have to spell it out, but when the license is open source, you can include any arbitrary number of distributions, and no one pays "extra" for the additional versions. (OK, not counting the packaging and CD costs.) Without significantly changing its price, Windows could include all of the Linux distributions, too. But somehow that's probably not going to happen.

3 Comments | Leave a Comment..


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  1.  

    No Subject Given

    identicon
    NOBODY, Jun 11th, 2004 @ 10:21am

    Sounds like another PR move by Robertson to stay in the lime light. Got to hand it to him. The man might no be the best CEO in the world, but he's great at getting attention. I wonder what his next project will be. Oh, oh, how about this: He starts a digital camera company, and calls it Slodack! He'll like totally copy their whole web site and change the name, and when he gets sued, he'll say "What, it's a kodack is a generic term meaning film. What's the problem?"

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  2.  

    Windows and Linux

    identicon
    aNonMooseCowherd, Jun 11th, 2004 @ 11:02am

    Windows could include all of the Linux distributions, too. But somehow that's probably not going to happen.

    On the contrary, I wouldn't be surprised to see Microsoft (or one of their stooges) include intentionally broken distributions of Linux along with Windows. More grist for the PR mill.

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  3.  

    Re: Windows and Linux

    identicon
    phoenix, Jun 14th, 2004 @ 1:17am

    That would backfire. They would have to include sources in any Linux distro they ship. Any breakage in the sources would be quickly discovered. They could theoretically distribute broken binaries with working sources but that would be detected pretty quickly as well. So in the end they would have a PR nightmare + another bunch of lawsuits with evidence all over the place.

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]


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