Linked by Michael Valentine on Mon 4th Apr 2005 11:50 UTC
I signed up to become a Lindows Insider (now
Linspire) back in February 2004, after giving Lindows 4.5 Developer Edition a try and walking away very impressed about how far Lindows had come. I was very hesitant plugging down $99.00 for something you could do free with most other Distros which I thought was beta testing and voicing your opinion, but figured I had nothing to lose since they offered a 100% Money Back Guarantee on the program.
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To Kevin :
As the person partially responsible for starting this debate, I'd like to thank you Kevin for taking the time to answer here. I think that was a great way to demonstrate that I was wrong when saying that you didn't answer to customers outside of Insiders.
Btw, just to clear out things, I am a LifeTime member of CNR, and I think I got a really great deal by doing that. Thanks a lot for offering that opportunity.
Just to make things even more clear, I am a developer, and I know the value of time when beta-testing, so this is why a lot of my questions were centered around value for the user versus value for Linspire.
Again thank you for answering honestly, and I have no problem at all that the $99 entrance fee is a barrier to entry to get the most motivated people. I understand this very well and I think the total value to the buyer is probably right, as the people participating in the program seem happy. And as you said you have a good money-back guarantee.
I did myself consider becoming an Insider, mostly out of curiosity because I liked 4.5 and wanted to see where Five-O was going. I didn't go through with it at the time because I didn't understand the value, and also because I couldn't spend the time testing the distribution, so I guess I was indeed not in your target market.
Just to quickly finish, I tested the Linspire Five-0 Live CD and unfortunately it didn't work on my Dell Dimension at work (I think it didn't like the graphic card, which is an ATI Radeon but connected with VGA, not DVI) and on my home machine it didn't recognize the on-board Ethernet card (on an ASUS P5GD1 motherboard). I did though get to see the GUI on my home machine, and I must say it looked impressive.
To Moulineuf :
I'm really sorry but I have a lot of trouble believing you are doing anything than flaming. How can you expect us to believe you have 50 people working for you analyzing Linspire ? Even stock market analysts do not assign as many resources on studying *one* company.
Sure Linspire has had problems with it's image. I do partly agree that they could do a better job about communicating what they have contributed. Why is it that Lsongs and Lphotos are open-source but that we don't see them in other distributions ? Are they too branded ? NVU seems to be doing better in that regard, and seems to have been very successful. I'm sure that Linspire is also working with OpenOffice, and I would love to see them get more involved, as this project has some amazing potential.
Despite all the negative things I've said about Linspire, I still like Michael Robertson's general direction (for example MP3Tunes is a *GREAT* idea !), and they are DEFINITELY on the right track for building a Linux distribution that is really easy to use !