Ron Schenone

Linspire Bails Out – Sells Assests To Xandros

Posted by on Jul 2, 2008 | 4 Comments

What some are describing as a secret back door deal, it seems that Linspire may have sold out to Xandros, according to a memo sent to shareholders. It also seems that some people are not to happy in the way the deal was made, which appears to have been behind closed doors. According to an article by Kevin Carmony, he states:

Today, as a Linspire shareholder, I received the below “memorandum” from Linspire. I have confirmed with several other Linspire shareholders that they too received this same notice.

In classic Michael Robertson form, he has once again completely disregarded the 100 some-odd shareholders of Linspire by pulling off this deal without a shareholder meeting. Most states require shareholder approval of any merger or reorganization of a corporation, or the sale or transfer of all or substantially all of the corporation’s assets. Regardless of state laws, common decency would dictate that even if a company only has 1 minority shareholder, there should be a shareholder meeting and the acquisition explained to all shareholders. What do Linspire shareholders get in place of a shareholder meeting? This completely worthless notice in the mail.

It is going to be interesting to see what action, if any, the sharholders decide to take. If they file a law suit the deal could be placed on hold for some time. Or they may just decide to let the deal go through, lick their wounds, and move on with life. Only time will tell what action takes place.

What do you think of the Linspire deal?

Comments welcome.

Source.

  • Ryan

    Ron, I was hoping you’d mention this.

    Linspire and Xandros deserve each other, they’re a merger of equals, equal NOTHINGS.

    Over the last 7 years they’ve both been trying to turn Linux into “cheap Windows” and what they’ve really been doing is selling a load of BS for $60 a license (and used to charge money for a subscription to a their package manager), they basically survived by trying to make real Linux seem many times harder than it is (especially Ubuntu for new users) and then telling you that you were saving all this money by giveing them $50 for each new version plus $20 a year for their package manager.

    If you think about that, you weren’t really saving anything vs. XP or Vista, so they put out their new CNR package manager for free to try to make themselves seem like a good deal again, which they still weren’t cause Ubuntu was free and well maintained.

    Linspire was never well maintained, it got away with this to some extent for being based on Debian Stable (which in Debian parlance means a new release every 3-4 years), so they were more or less Debian compatible no matter how bad they screwed over the release.

    Until Linspire 6.0 (The current release based on Ubuntu, two releases ago) they even logged in the user as Root (Something you NEVER EVER do on unix), and Michael Robertson tried to play this off as a “convenience”, after destroying the best security Linux had until just recently (MAC/MIC).

    Anyway, I think maybe Kevin Carmony might be an alright guy, but forced out because of the evil greedy SOB running the whole Linspire operation (Robertson).

    Anyway, watch Freespire die off within the next year, and then Xandros will eventually go under too, they’re bother floundering (Xandros and Linspire together have less than 10% of Ubuntu’s user count).

  • http://wp3.lockergnome.com/nexus/blade/ Ron Schenone

    Hi Ryan,
    I agree about Freespire. I doubt Xandros will maintain it.

    Later, Ron

  • http://www.lawofficelinux.com Zale

    Simply a brilliant move on the part of Xandros to get CNR under their control and on future Asus EEE’s.

  • Ryan

    Zale: CNR has been under a free license (GPL I think) for over a year, so if Xandros wanted it, they could have just taken it.

    I see it as Linspire doing real bad, Robertson wanted to sell it for whatever he could get, Xandros considered it as a cheap way of taking out a competitor.

    You’ll notice if you read Kevin Carmony’s blog that Robertson sold Linspire without even consulting the shareholders (isn’t this illegal?) after refusing to hold shareholder meetings for the last 2 sessions they should have, so he’s been cooking this for a while.

    It’s a real hard sell to convince most people that are interested in leaving Windows or Mac that they should pay for Linux, when there’s so many good distributions giving it away, and maybe in some perverted way we owe the relative ease of use of modern Ubuntu, Fedora, Sabayon, etc. to Linspire for proving how easy it was to take an almost incomprehensible system (That is where Linux was 10 years ago), and turn it into something that non-technical users shouldn’t have too hard of a time dealing with.

    I’d rate the experience of a user new to computers as easier with some modern Linux systems than Windows, there are books to teach you how to set them up, and do what you want, and after that they practically take care of themselves.