LinuxDevices.com Vanishes From the Web 69
DeviceGuru writes "Embedded Linux pioneer LinuxDevices.com departed from the web earlier this week. The site became a collateral casualty of the aquisition of eWEEK by Quinstreet in February 2012, as part of a bundle of Ziff Davis Enterprise assets. Quinstreet immediately fired all the LinuxDevices staffers and ceased maintaining the site. A few days ago, the site's plug was finally pulled and it is now gone from the Web, save for a few pages on the WayBack Machine. For more than a decade, LinuxDevices played a pivotal role in serving and fostering an emerging embedded Linux ecosystem, and it was well respected by the embedded Linux community at the time it was acquired by QuinStreet. Unfortunately, the site did not mesh well with QuinStreet's B2B market focus. Fortunately, its spirit remains alive and well at LinuxGizmos.com, a site recently launched by LinuxDevices founder Rick Lehrbaum."
Why simply shut it down? Why not give it back? (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems senseless to shut it down and just 'disappear' it entirely from the interwebs. Why not give the data and the domain to the original site creator and leave him to it? The response of corporations to either:
A. Own it
B. Grind it into the dust
Is destroying the very environment in which corporations flourish. Chew up the competitors, spit them out then buy up anything new which is created in their wake. Most corporations are like big dumb 5 year olds, take what they want with no respect for anyone else and if they don't like it, drop it
Re:Why simply shut it down? Why not give it back? (Score:1, Insightful)
Seems like the fault lies with the person who sold the "community" site to the corporation in the first place.
Re:Why simply shut it down? Why not give it back? (Score:4, Insightful)
Most corporations are like big dumb 5 year olds, take what they want with no respect for anyone else and if they don't like it, drop it .. never admit their mistake and never look back.
Both five year olds and corporations have limitations on liability for their poor behaviors. In the case of the five year old, the goal is to get him out of that behavior as soon as possible. In the case of corporations, the goal is to encourage that behavior. The losses society suffers for it are converted into corporate tax revenue for the government - that's why it creates and encourages them.
Re:Why simply shut it down? Why not give it back? (Score:4, Insightful)
Even beyond that, they'll be damned if anybody uses it for free without *them* making something off of it, even when it's a legacy product that has no marketing potential whatsoever. This is part of why copyright law is so screwed up right now - lots of companies work very hard to ensure that nothing they produce ever becomes public domain where it could be freely used by others, which was the entire point of copyright to begin with.
Re:Why simply shut it down? Why not give it back? (Score:4, Insightful)
Talk about useless (Score:4, Insightful)
Can somebody please pull Quinstreet's [quinstreet.com] plug? With extreme prejudice. Any outfit that can't comprehensibly explain what they do [quinstreet.com] is pretty bloody useless.