Is Xandros a Linux distro, a marketing machine or a Microsoft stooge?

David M Williams
Monday, 15 June 2009 13:20

Business IT - Technology

You may know of Xandros Linux; for many people exposure came through the Eee PC, with this being the distro chosen by Linux-turncoat ASUS. Yet, what is Xandros' stance on open source software? Might Xandros be a thinly-veiled Microsoft tout as Linspire reborn?

Microsoft has previously funded portions of SCO’s case against IBM and previously ran anti-Linux campaigns under the dubious title "Get the facts."

Failing to stop Linux through these measures, Microsoft began signing cross-licensing agreements with players like Novell, Xandros and others.

Novell is a large player and in fact own the copyright to the UNIX trademark. If any Linux version ought to be titled UNIX it would be Novell’s own SuSE which can lay claim to the greatest right. Plenty of commentators spoke on their opinion about this agreement.

Yet, Xandros escaped the flak. For the most part, Xandros is your regular garden-variety dot com business, making news every so often to get more venture capital cash to keep its doors open.

Or is it?

Xandros began life as Corel Linux, a Debian-based distribution which was acquired along with the development team behind the product from Corel Corporation in August 2001.

This came nine months or so after Corel’s announcement to sell off completely (or, at the time, gain additional investments in) its Linux business. Just the previous month – October 2000 – Corel obtained a $US 135m investment from Microsoft.

Microsoft said it planned to use the Microsoft cash infusion to make its applications compliant with the still new Microsoft .Net framework technologies. Yet, as part of the terms of the deal, Corel were also to port this framework to Linux. I am not aware Corel fulfilled this, given the rise of the Mono project, but Microsoft clearly placed their money and their fingers into Corel’s product – a legacy that Xandros inherited by acquisition.

Within a year of the acquisition Xandros were poised to make their first release, in the midst of rumours of financial problems.

Xandros President Michael Bego told DesktopLinux.com that Xandros would announce at the coming LinuxWorld conference a complete desktop solution aimed specifically at low-powered PCs, making it “a practical solution for machines which have no hope of running resource-hungry Microsoft products.”

While such a statement proclaims a chief achievement of Linux, namely its ability to effectively and efficiently run modern software on low-powered hardware, it is surprising and telling by today’s standards that Bego did not also claim Xandros would be a viable alternative to Microsoft Windows on contemporary hardware.

It was not known then but Xandros was soon to become central to one of the greatest farces in Linux history, known as LindowsOS.