When is it time to quit

 Some people have asked me when/if I will ever stop developing Linspire/Freespire/Xandros.  My answer has always been, when there is no need for me to do it.  As I approach 50 the curtain call is inevitable.  Time is that inevitable thing that we have no control over.  So is that time now?  No.  Of course not.

There are very few companies aside from us and Canonical who focus on the commercial desktop space.   Most enterprise Linux companies focus on servers.  As much as people hate when I say this, ChromeOS and Android are NOT Linux distributions.  They use the Linux kernel.  That is it.  The rest of it is proprietary to Google.  We compete with them for customers and yes Google has been very successful.  We do sell a TON of Chromebooks, Chromeboxes and Chromebases to our Education and some enterprise customers but the installed base for Linspire is nothing to cackle at.

But, back to when it is time for Linspire to hang up its hat.  That time will come when something comes along that makes us irrelevant in the commercial desktop space.  From the demand for our products and from our customers we are nowhere near that point.  The closest would be ChromeOS/ChromeOS Flex.  We had 20 of our customers pilot ChromeOS Flex.  We helped them with setup and testing.  How many dropped Linspire and adopted ChromeOS Flex? 3 of them.  We still help them.  We provide them with support and we test new and old systems they want to deploy to make sure Flex runs well and there are no issues.  

Three customers, is nowhere near the threshold that would make me fold up shop and become a Google house.  Nowhere close.  Now as time goes on and Flex gets better.  The Linux support gets better and if/when Android apps come to it THEN we will reevaluate our position.  The approach of PWA's with offline capabilities is becoming very attractive to businesses and to our industry.  Even Microsoft's apps are becoming PWA's and I think the ChromeOS model is one that will succeed in the near future.  The security model, the method of digesting apps, and the infrastructure is far more powerful to users and consumers than what most people give them credit for.  Hell, there have been some murmurs that Windows 12 will ship in S mode by default.  You will only be able to install apps that have been vetted by Microsoft from their app store and with those being "sandboxed" and not being able to touch the core system will take Windows to the next level in terms of security.  Of course they will have to find some way to make a "developer mode"  available but that is on them to figure that out IF they go that route.

As for Linspire.  Businesses and consumers want that traditional desktop experience.  Businesses want to control their data whether that is local storage or creating a private cloud.  Not a lot of businesses and especially Government agencies want to trust their data to public clouds.  So as long as there is a need for the traditional desktop experience for businesses, education, government agencies and consumers.  Linspire will continue to exist.  So when the need for a traditional commercial desktop system ceases to exist that is when it's time to quit.

Olympus Has Fallen: Turmoil at IBM and Red Hat

 So with the news that Red Hat Linux will stop releasing the source code for RHEL publicly and now customers will have to purchase that access and well; they cant publicly share that code.  IBM is one of those companies who dont mind profiting off of open source technologies.  They just dont understand it.  They dont get community (TeamOS/2).  Look at their business partnerships that always seem to fall apart.  Ask Commodore (Well get a Ouija Board and ask Commodore) ask Microsoft and ask Apple.  Failure, after failure after failure.

Well first lets dispose with the doom and gloom that everyone seems to be pissed off and spreading.  You can still share the Fedora source code and since most of RHEL is based on Fedora community distributions such as AlmaLinux, Oracle Linux and Rocky Linux will not be going away.  So while this is not a problem as it is more of an annoyance.

Can IBM do this legally?  Yes.  The GPL and subsequent licenses state you have to make the source code available.  It does not say you have to provide it for free.  The only thing I see that may be an issue is that IBM dba Red Hat says you cannot make that source code available public.  That is the one condition where I personally feel they will run into some problems.  But yes, it is legal but I think challenges could successfully be made in court about some of the stipulations but thats a wait and see what happens.

Red Hat themselves responded to much of this criticism in a blog post by Mike McGrath.  Now, I dont know Mike and Im not criticizing Mike.  Im sure his blog post was vetted and changed 50 times before it went public.  But those statements were a bunch of BULLSHIT.  So lets dissect these one at at time shall we.

We will always send our code upstream and abide by the open source licenses our products use, which includes the GPL..

This is true.  No complaints here

I feel that much of the anger from our recent decision around the downstream sources comes from either those who do not want to pay for the time, effort and resources going into RHEL or those who want to repackage it for their own profit. This demand for RHEL code is disingenuous. 

This is one I disagree with.  No, these complaints are not just from rebuilders who want to rip you off or "take your hard work and profit from it"  I actually didnt hear about this situation from the community or news.  I heard about this from a CUSTOMER. who uses your SRPM's to add a driver that you guys dont include for a specific piece of hardware they use.  WAKE UP CALL thats the WHOLE POINT OF OPEN SOURCE.  Further in the statement he focuses on the rebuilders which shows me this is more about making money than it is about community.  This companese translates to "This is the easiest and most efficient way to profit off of rebuilders."  If you dont want to share your source or would much prefer to protect your product from the mean rebuilders who refuse to pay you, go use FreeBSD.  FreeBSD is just as usable on the desktop, server and mainframe as Linux is these days and their license says you can refuse to share source code that you dont want to share.  50,000 distributions based on Debian and you dont see them complaining.  The anger you see is that you are taking away something people are used to and USE and putting it behind a paywall.  The only people who will be happy about this decision are Oracle and SUSE.

Simply rebuilding code, without adding value or changing it in any way, represents a real threat to open source companies everywhere. This is a real threat to open source, and one that has the potential to revert open source back into a hobbyist- and hackers-only activity.

That statement reminds me of Bill Gates open letter to hobbyists from the 70's.  It was bullshit then, its bullshit now.   In EVERYTHING you have the basic building blocks.  People dont want to change the core system.  Most rebuilders out there, myself included, we do add value.to rebuilds.  We offer service and support at a much cheaper cost than you do.  With our releases we control the update cycle and we take liability off of YOU guys.  If something goes wrong.  We take the blame.  You dont see people who have issues with Linspire or Xandros go to Red Hat or Canonical.  I fall on the sword for that.  When people have issues with ChromeOS/ChromeOS Flex they dont go to Gentoo or Debian for that.  They go to Google.  Once again, companese that says "We dont want to share unless you pay us."  BTW the statement he made here "We don’t want that and I know our community members, customers and partners don’t want that. Innovation happens in the upstream. Building on the shoulders of others is what open source is about. Let’s continue to drive innovation, support one another and keep moving forward." contradicts Red Hats stance on this situation .

Now, there are some in the community who say we cant trust company led distributions and we need to just focus on community distributions.  We cant do that unfortunately.  Community distributions dont have the infrastructure, man-power or finances to run on site service calls.  They dont make the money to employ anyone.  Nor do they have the liability insurance to do that.  So like it or not company led distributions are a necessity and unless you are IBM, we LOVE our jobs and we love Linux.  Driving community led distribution ONLY will just make the unemployment lines longer.

As for Red Hats future; I think this is the beginning of the end.  While you have people at Red Hat themselves who get community and who get the benefits of open source IBM just DOESNT and they dont want to.  Their mindset is from the 80's they see software as a product and something they can make money off of.  They see it as ITS OURS.  So if you are a company that relies on Red Hat technology my recommendation would be to start side-by-side deploying Oracle Linux as a backup plan.  I have been in this industry since 1994.  I have seen this movie.  There will be no happy ending.  Now, can Red Hat turn this around?  They could but I dont think IBM will let them.  I would be very surprised.