Linspire CEO Justifies Microsoft Partnership

Linspire CEO and President Kevin Carmony is his latest newsletter explains his companies position in forging a deal with Microsoft. One of his statements in his newsletter was:

Saying that Linux is going to be torn in two, makes for good press and lively debates, but this is certainly nothing new for Linux. There are far more material splits today in the Linux world, such as Debian vs RPM, KDE vs GNOME, Distro A vs Distro B, and so on. These divisions are quite material, and dilute significant energy and efforts across competing standards. However, we accept this as the price we pay for freedom of choice.

In previous articles I have written I have mentioned this very same thing about the amount of distributions and lack of a general direction for Linux. Freedom of choice is one thing. But having people writing Linux versions by the hundreds seems to me as counter productive.

If all of these people put their minds together and worked on a single Linux distribution, I am sure they would be able to come up with a version that would knock Windows for a loop. I went over to DistroWatch and took a look at the stats and there are 358 versions of Linux they show on their site here. After you get past the first 50 or so, the remaining 300 just muddy the waters. How much different can these 300 be from each other?

I don’t believe that the bottom 300 need to wait by their phones for Microsoft to call and wanting to cut a deal.

You can’t divide the Linux community any further since it is already divided by 358 times.

That’s my 2 cents. What do you think?

Full newsletter here.

[tags]linux, divided, microsoft, linspire, [/tags]