Linspire

» see linspire.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

lindows was a us walmart story before it was anything else. by '02 walmart was selling $299 microtel desktop pcs with lindowsos preinstalled, the only consumer non-microsoft desktop to land on a us big-box retail shelf at scale that decade. that distribution did not reach ankara (close enough). by then i was on a 33.6k modem in turkey running windows xp, and the handful of people running desktop linux around me were mandrake 9 holdouts or red hat 7 stragglers. lindows lived in a sentence about us retail and lawsuits, not on any machine i ever touched.

i watched the project from a distance like most engineering students did, anyway. michael robertson incorporated lindows inc. in july 2001 in san diego while the $372 million vivendi acquisition of his previous company mp3.com was still closing. for whatever reason, he picked desktop linux as the next thing. the pitch was a debian fork with a codeweavers wine compatibility layer underneath that promised to run microsoft office through it. lindowsos shipped in january 2002. walmart picked it up the same year for the microtel pc line. the press treated the price point and the name as the story, not the technology underneath.

microsoft filed suit in late 2001 over the windows trademark. that lawsuit became the entire shape of the brand for the next three years. judge john coughenour in seattle let the case go to a jury in 2004 on the question of whether the word window was generic before the operating system shipped, which was a question microsoft did not want answered. in those days the windows trademark itself was on the table. microsoft settled in july 2004 for around $20 million in exchange for the lindows name. the company renamed itself to linspire and kept shipping.

anyway, linspire ran for four more years on click-n-run, its paid app marketplace, before the company sold to xandros in july 2008 and quietly wound down on august 8 of that year. there is a 2018 pc/opensystems llc revival selling a paid ubuntu-based distribution under the linspire name, which is a different company doing a different thing. the cultural artifact died with the xandros announcement (roughly).

~ the case file ~

~ the lawsuit ~

microsoft v. lindows.com is the case that surfaced an awkward fact about the windows trademark. the word predated the product by a decade in technical writing, the kind of word courts treat with suspicion when registered as a brand. xerox parc and apple had used windowing in print years before microsoft shipped the first version. judge coughenour ruled in 2004 that the genericness question had to go to a jury, and microsoft folded rather than risk losing the trademark itself. paying $20 million to make the lawsuit go away was, on the math, cheap.

the case also ran in parallel across europe and canada through 2003, for whatever reason. lindows used the settlement money to keep running for another four years on a name nobody would ever associate with the original product. the rename worked against the brand. lindows was a verb. linspire was a wordless syllable nobody could place. by 2006 the company had stopped being the linux story in tech press and had become a small zombie shipping click-n-run app installers to a shrinking subscriber list.

~ what got buried with it ~

the bigger thing that died with linspire was the idea that a us retail channel could move a non-microsoft desktop at consumer price points. nobody else tried it at that scale until chromebooks landed in 2011 with a completely different model. walmart did not run another preinstalled non-windows pc line. the codeweavers wine compatibility layer survived and is still shipping in 2026 as crossover, the one piece of the linspire stack that is unambiguously alive. michael robertson moved on, founded sipphone and then mp3tunes, then gizmo5, the voip company google bought in 2009 and shut down in 2011 which is already a separate grave on this site.

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