But Wait, There's More. Three Linux Distros With Lindows
from the Lindows,-shmindows dept
Apparently having gotten over the whole "what's-our-name" thing, Lindows has come up with a little surprise. In addition to Linspire, two other Linux distributions -- Fedora and Mandrake -- are going to be packaged together with the Lindows distribution. According to the Lindows president, they want to encourage their customers to compare their product to the other distributions of Linux. Why include three competing versions? One could assume: because competition is good for innovation. If more options are better, then what better way to demonstrate the value of a product than by letting the customer decide? However, some people have completely missed the point, as evidenced by one of the quotes in the article: "Who is going to pay money to download three Linux distributions?" It sounds ridiculous to have to spell it out, but when the license is open source, you can include any arbitrary number of distributions, and no one pays "extra" for the additional versions. (OK, not counting the packaging and CD costs.) Without significantly changing its price, Windows could include all of the Linux distributions, too. But somehow that's probably not going to happen.
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Windows and Linux
On the contrary, I wouldn't be surprised to see Microsoft (or one of their stooges) include intentionally broken distributions of Linux along with Windows. More grist for the PR mill.
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Re: Windows and Linux
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