Linux desktop manufacturer Xandros has acquired Linspire for an undisclosed amount. Xandros will also be keeping existing engineering, support, and key sales employees, and long-time Linspire employee and CEO Larry Kettler will be joining the Xandros executive team as the VP of Business Development. While Xandros didn’t mention their total employee numbers, Xandros CEO Andreas Typaldos claims Xandros to be the third largest Linux company in the world after the acquisition. Former Linspire CEO Kevin Carmony has some harsh criticism of the deal on his blog.

More at Socialized Software.

It's interesting on reading the blogs. Kevin states that Mandriva won't survive

Of course, let's hope that's not the case. Hoping that Mandriva is improving now and been able to make some money to continue going and not become bankrupt again.

this has been discussed before and the consensus is that mandriva the company might perish but while the distro serves its purpose and earns the loyalty of a few dedicated geeks then it will continue to survive in one form or another. PCLinuxOS would be a great example. it began its life during the period when some of us ( ) hated the direction the company is going but stuck with the distro because we loved it nevertheless.

or was that just me?

ciao!

I still love it too

Very true.

As I recall, Kevin's tune *used* to be that Mandriva wouldn't survive because Linspire would beat it...

Now now, there's no need to kick a man while he's down.

I don't think Xandros or Linspire would ever get a respectable market share. Factly, I do not even care if they will vanish or not.
There is nothing inspiring about their business model, and more than that their customers are currently limited to EEEpc users who have no skills to install something else to these little machines.

sadly that doesn't seem to be the case that it will now - even if there was a slim chance

I remember how many users dropped Xandros when they partnered with Microsoft. I even admit using it for an hour (including installation) or two max and hated every minute of it.

i actually think that xandros is a GREAT transition os for folks weening off of windows

problem is they havent had an upgrade in several YEARS

i actualy paid for a copy and liked it a lot, than MCNL came out and xandros annpunced that they were STOPPING development of their live disk sooo......

I agree with you there mindwave, I used Xandros OSE for a while when I was 'coming off' windows and I liked it a lot. With the notable exception that - as you said - it was never updated. Not only that but if you tried to add extra software (eg Amarok, K3b) they just linked you to a site where you could buy it!! I didn't know very much then but I did know that I wasn't going to pay for open source software. I did try installing things from source but never managed it, that might have been because they found some way to stop you doing that or more likely it might have been due to my incompetence with the command line (not that that has changed much!).

crappy linux distro buys crappy linux distro. wooo!