Following up Saturday's post on Red Hat and the Clone Wars with a prequel.
This is a look at early days of Linux and Red Hat's first controversial changes that disrupted clones and copies as it prepared to take on proprietary UNIX and Windows NT.
@jzb FYI, Lindows, aka "Linspire" still exists. They just changed their name after it was evident they would win the trademark lawsuit Microsoft filed against them and sold the rights to it to Microsoft for a pretty penny.
@vwbusguy@jzb they also have been a subject of several acquisitions. Now owned by some PC/OpenSystems. I don't think there is a lot of continuity beyond the name.
@vwbusguy@jzb Mandriva went through one and then basically died. OpenMandriva doesn't really have much in common with the original Mandriva. Linspire was first acquired by Xandros (remember them?) and the Xandros by PC/OpenSystems and there was not much continuity. They merged the distros, or completely rebased them just keeping the name. People behind it mostly didn't stay either... SUSE has had quite a few owners, but the people and the product have stayed.
@gbraad Yeah, I noticed that, too. He mentions the change later in the post and I didn't want to be too critical of a well written piece, so I limited it to Linspire, but that bugged me, too
@gbraad it was originally Mandrake, but they were having some trademark dispute and in 2005 they acquired a small Brazilian Linux vendor Conectiva and used that as an opportunity to change the name to Mandriva and solve the trademark problem.
The company actually never was a subject of an acquisition. They went bankrupt in 2010 and what was left of the distro was picked up by Russian ROSA and Mageia community.
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