Tuesday 1 July 2008

Linspire for sale? Sold!

Here's a surprise. Linspire (including Freespire and Click 'N Run) has been sold to Xandros. Some share-holders are less than impressed about this.

Kevin Carmony, ex-CEO of Linspire writes on his blog:

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.

And follows up with:

Why would Linspire pull off a midnight, back-room sell-off without a shareholders meeting? I'd ask them myself, but they haven't returned emails from me in the last ten months, and since they didn't hold a shareholders meeting in this matter, one is only left to speculate.

Does this mean that Linspire / Freespire / CNR is dead? Maybe. Things haven't been that rosy of late in the Linspire garden. My own dealings with them have been less than fruitful.

I signed up with CNR as a publisher a couple of months ago. Sort of. You see, I received a couple of welcome emails after signing up, but no instructions on how to submit my software onto CNR. Multiple (polite) emails were left unanswered. Pity really as CNR looked like a promising way of providing software to multiple distros.

Regular readers (hello mum!) will remember my positive review of the latest Freespire release, I just hope that Xandros hasn't bought Linspire to bury what was a polished alternative to Ubuntu and a decent distro in its own right.

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