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."
LinuxGIsmos is fine but (Score:5, Funny)
Re:LinuxGIsmos is fine but (Score:4, Funny)
Pfft.
Widgets forever!
You and your pansy little girly-gadgets!
aaand site's offilne (Score:4, Funny)
Looks like we just /.ed LinuxGizmos.com
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Perhaps it was the universe's way of letting us let Rick know he forgot ServerTokens ProductOnly, or to tell him about Apache Traffic Server for his new endeavor.
His prior one was one of the few sites I've bothered to keep in my RSS reader, so I look forward to his impending success and traffic.
AND ... !! (Score:2, Funny)
Another One Bits the Dust !!
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
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Seems like the fault lies with the person who sold the "community" site to the corporation in the first place.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Fortunately, we live in a time when we can just flout the unconstitutional and undemocratic copyright laws. The sad part (and this is also to the big corporations boon) is that it actually hurts the little guy who wants copyright protection. The average pirate doesn't see the difference between pirating a 50 year old Beatles record (copyright held by God knows who anymore, the estate of Michael Jackson?) and a brand spanking new one, because, legally, there is no difference.
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they would rather something die out than let anybody possibly make a single cent off of it.
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.
the actual logic is that the users have a finite amount of time to spend using things. if you fill their time with something free, they're not going to be using something they would need to pay you to use.
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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.
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Hahaha, that's a good one!
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Playing the "corporations pay no taxes" card may work well on OWS posters, but it's not a good way to excel in a public policy debate.
Re:Why simply shut it down? Why not give it back? (Score:4, Informative)
according to taxpolicycenter.org, corporate taxes accounted for 9% of all revenue in fy 2012.
gp's point is pretty valid
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
1. Start something.
2. Get bought.
3. Jump ship and start the same thing under a different name.
3a. Let old thing get burned. Waste time and money of whoever bought it.
4. Profit. !
The dude should build up LinuxGizmos till QuinStreet falls for it again. Just hire all the people who get fired each time.
Re:Why simply shut it down? Why not give it back? (Score:4, Insightful)
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That's what I can't understand; it's not like the site competed with anything else in their portfolio. It didn't mesh because it just wasn't something they were interested in as a business. In circumstances like those I really can't see why they don't spin it off in some way.
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The publisher is about BUSINESS not writing. If it took them more than 5 minutes to understand, then they already lost their attention span. Selling it or spinning it off would require more than 5 minutes to figure out what it was worth and who would want it.
They WANTED other ZD assets to add to their collection and the rest were for the bin. That's how large companies work.
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The reason is that corporations are immoral to the extreme. They never contribute anything willingly, they are egoistical to the extend that they ignore the world, they willingly take from others but never give, etc. In the (increasingly rare) cases where this is not the case, you always find some individual or small group of individuals with intact personal ethics and enough clout within the corporation to do differently. Or you find somebody that has realized public image actually matters and is justifyin
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A corporation will never, ever, ever behave in any way or do anything whatsoever without it actually being some individual or a group of individuals within doing so in its name. A corporation is legal fiction and just as incapable of independent action as any other fictitious en
Good Luck Rick! (Score:3)
WayBack machine.. (Score:2)
I cannot see even a few recent pages on the WayBack machine; just crawl time errors and
Are the pull-the-plug drones really that efficient or has it been broken for some time?
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Nothing is preventing anyone from packaging all the GNU tools into a .apk and installer short of not giving a rat's ass. Won't you please give a rat's ass?
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Have you looked into Sailfish OS?
Quinstreet lost LinuxDevices archive .. (Score:4, Interesting)
Quinstreet could restore a lot of goodwill by donating the LinuxDevices news archive to linuxgizmos.com [linuxgizmos.com]
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They're spammers. Nothing they do is going to get them any goodwill.
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Are we talking about the same site? As badly as I want to feel sad, I can't even remember the last time that site had anything that seemed relevant, especially ever since Android arrived.
It's harsh, but as a practical matter, the "Linux Appliance" market is kind of in a state of both crisis and opportunity right now. Crisis, because anything x86 based with less computing power than a 2GHz+ Core2 can't really compete with a nameless Android USB-HDMI stick from Shenzhen... but those same nameless USB-HDMI And
Re: Too bad (Score:2)
In certain ways embedded devices have actually become a bit more mainstream. First there is the Arduino and then there is the legion of boards using ARM based SoCs, which include the RaspberryPi and the Beagle Bone. And now you can write your code in a language such as Python. Embedded devices are a lot more capable than than they used to be.
There are certainly more out there and the market seems to be developing. The problem I find is that it isn't always easy finding what is going in in the market.
Linux D
Maybe they don't care anymore? (Score:2)
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Having worked at a company acquired by QuinStreet, (Score:4, Informative)
I have no respect for QS. They look at people as chits to cashed in. People are their currency. If you can't monetize someone right now, then the source is ipso facto useless. Mind you, Insurance.com sent out its share of emails (er, spam), but at the same time we had some pretty good voices of the consumer at the table as well -- myself included. QS had none of that.
Beyond the consumer angle, they are a meat grinder for the employees. I met very few folks in my year there that had more than a year or two of tenure. There are a couple people I worked with that were there for years that were waiting to cash out and leave (some have left since then), but they were few and far between.
If anyone wants to know anything, feel free to ask.
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Nothing like the bitter ramblings of a laid off employee. But this is slashdot, we love biased one off anecdotes. Mod this man up!!!!1
it sounds he would have liked being laid off instead of being kept to keep the lights on...
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Quinstreet, sounds more like Queer Street to me. Are they associated with Apple by any chance?
Or maybe quimm street, after all they are a bunch of cunts
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.
Sites Still Get Slashdotted in 2013? (Score:2)
I stopped reading reddit, so maybe they linked to it, too. I guess I was a little surprised that this would happen, given that we Linux people remain somewhat of a niche.
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