Ex-Linspire chief defects to Ubuntu

Mitt Romney is next

By Ashlee Vance in Mountain View • Get more from this author

Posted in Operating Systems, 17th October 2007 19:34 GMT

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Former Linspire CEO Kevin Carmony has shown all the loyalty of a free agent athlete. Just a few months after resigning from Linspire, Carmony has traded in his old company's Linux operating system for Ubuntu.

Carmony, who seems awfully keen to get a job at Ubuntu's parent company Canonical, made his OS reveal on an Ubuntu message board.

Now that I'm no longer the CEO of Linspire, or under any obligation to use that particular distribution, I thought I should take some time and look around at all the distributions and decide which one was right for me and my PC. In addition to already being quite familiar with Linspire and Freespire, I also looked at Novell/Suse, Red Hat/Fedora, PC Linux, Ubuntu, and Kubuntu.

Well, after all my research, I have to tell you, it was an easy choice. Ubuntu! I'm excited for the new release in a few days, which I will use to replace the many Linux desktop and laptop PCs I own (five).

Not content with pushing Ubuntu on himself, Carmony has pledged to put the operating system in front of his favorite politician - super rich conservative Mitt Romney - aka the Mormon Minx. (Thanks to Martin Owens for the tip.)

"Mitt's a very bright guy, and I look forward to giving him a demo of Ubuntu one day," Carmony wrote. "Obviously, right now isn't the best time for that, given his schedule, but I think he'll like what he sees."

Carmony is a member of the Mitt Romney for President fan club and a member of "Team Mitt."

Life has been tough for Carmony since he left Linspire.

Earlier this week he was accosted by a Christian who banned Carmony from running through the Horizon Christian Fellowship parking lot. Carmony is now considering retaliation tactics against his fellow Christians for trying to block his physical fitness mission.

"Maybe next time I run through their parking lot, I'll bring along a video camera, tape them calling the police, and post it on You Tube," Carmony wrote on his blog. "If I'm lucky, maybe they'll use a taser gun on me!"

As for Linspire? Well, it released Linspire 6.0 last week to little fanfare.

The OS maker has lost a bit of street cred with the open source software faithful after signing a partnership agreement with Microsoft. ®

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