Xandros Continues Linux Buildout with Linspire Buy

Published: July 8, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The commercial Linux distribution business just got a little bit less diverse but perhaps a little stronger while IT Jungle was off on holiday last week when New York-based Xandros acquired fellow Linux distro Linspire for an undisclosed sum. The deal brings together two of the more famous providers of commercial Debian Linuxes and will provide something of a counterweight to the other big Debian provider, Canonical, which creates and distributes Ubuntu.

Xandros, you will remember, is the company that was founded in the wake of graphics and office automation software maker Corel's attempt to become a Linux distributor a decade ago, which it spun out in 2001 as a separate entity. Xandros has attempted to create a Debian Linux that plays nicely with Windows and has some of the same look and feel of Windows, to which the company created its own Xandros File Manager to make something that works like the File Manager in Windows. Most recently, Xandros has become famous as the supplier of the Linux embedded in the popular ASUS Eee PC, a tiny little flash-based laptop PC. (I got my wife one of these for Mother's Day, and she adores it because she can lug it around everywhere since it is no larger than a hardcover book. Which she also lugs around, now that I think about it.) Just as Xandros was cooking up the second edition of its Xandros Server variant last summer, it acquired Scalix, the HP-UX OpenMail groupware program that was spun out of Hewlett-Packard, ported to Linux, and open sourced.

Linspire, like Xandros, has had big dreams for Linux on the desktop, and the San Diego company was also founded in 2001, but with the fortunate name of Lindows, not Linspire. Microsoft tried to bully Lindows in the courts of its trademark on "Windows," which we all know is utterly preposterous, and then lost its case in court. As part of the $20 million lawsuit settlement Microsoft offered, Lindows changed its name to Linspire. In early 2007, the company announced that it would be basing its future distros on the Ubuntu code base, and that summer it launched the Freespire open development project, which is akin to the Fedora project at Red Hat and the openSUSE project at Novell.

Around the same time in June 2007, both Xandros and Linspire announced that they had inked collaboration agreements with Microsoft, much as Novell has done in November 2006, but Microsoft went further with Novell and actually prepaid for $240 million in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server licenses and is distributing those Linuxes to its Windows customer base. Neither Xandros nor Linspire were big enough or influential enough to get such a distribution deal with Big Bill; Red Hat has shown no inclination to do such a deal, which would be surprising if it should ever come to pass and would perhaps be worth $1 billion or more in incremental revenue to Red Hat. (Food for thought, that.)

Both Xandros and Linspire have done a lot to craft desktop Linuxes that have some snap to them, and both have also created digital software libraries containing thousands of programs that allow end users to install programs with mouse clicks and without any knowledge of package managers--which is a good thing for most end users.

As part of the acquisition, Linspire has changed its name to Digital Cornerstone and has sold all of its assets to Xandros. According to Andreas Typaldos, chief executive officer at Xandos, Linspire and Xandros have been in talks off and on over the years about combining; these talks accelerated at the end of 2007. Larry Kettler, who is currently chief executive officer at Linspire, has joined Xandros as vice president of business development. All of the engineering and support staff at Linspire plus key sales people have been retained, with some back-office employees who are redundant being let go. Xandros operates its business from New York, but has the old Corel development lab in Ottawa, Ontario; it also has offices in the United Kingdom, Germany, Brazil, Poland, Maylasia, Japan, and India, and says that it will keep the San Diego offices of Linspire open as well. Typaldos has been named president of Linspire, and Cary Harper, who is vice president of engineering at Linspire, now reports to Ming Poon, who holds that post at Xandros.

While product plans have not been announced for a combined Xandros-Linspire line, the company has said that it will keep the Freespire product development effort going and at this point (and of course, subject to change) it plans to maintain both the Xandros and Linspire product lines. (I happen to think that a small company should not try to provide two distinct Debian releases, for economic not technical reasons. But if Xandros says it can do it, so much the better for its two customer bases.) Product names are also going to stay in place, even as they provide tighter integration between the Xandros and Linspire products. It could turn out that Xandros becomes the preferred server and Linspire becomes the preferred desktop, when all is said and done, rather than trying to merge the products to create a single server-desktop product. But I still think this is an inefficient way to do it. Red Hat, Novell, and Canonical all have one Linux, which is spun into different editions for different iron. All that Xandros has said is that the Click 'N Run application library for Linspire will be ported to Xandros Linux some time this month.

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