Linux-Watch on Monday published an interview with Kevin Carmony in which he said he had resigned from the San Diego, California on July 31 to work on other business projects and support Mitt Romney’s campaign to become Republican presidential candidate.
Linspire had not responded to requests for comment or confirmation by press time. Carmony had been at Linspire since its inception in 2001 and was promoted from president to CEO in May 2005 as founder Michael Robertson stepped up to the role of chairman.
According to the Linux-Watch interview, Carmony denied that his resignation was due to a falling out with Robertson or was related to the company’s recent controversial interoperability and patent deal with Microsoft.
After Novell and Xandros, Linspire became the third Linux vendor to sign such a deal in May as it teamed up with Microsoft on document format compatibility, instant messaging, fonts, digital media, and web search, and received a patent covenant from Microsoft not to sue Linspire’s customers for patent infringement.
According to the terms of the recently published GPLv3, that agreement could leave Linspire in a difficult position. The Free Software Foundation attempted to prevent a repeat of Microsoft’s patent deal with Novell, insisting that any deal done after 28 March 2007 would see the patent covenant passed on to all GPLv3 licensees.
It remains to be seen whether Linspire will avoid using GPLv3 code in order to prevent the covenant being passed on or use the code and risk a legal battle.
According to the Linux-Watch story, Carmony plans to devote his time to other business interests, including a chain of photography studios and an online dating service, as well as supporting the campaign of Mitt Romney, former Governor of Massachusetts, to secure the Republican candidacy for the 2008 presidential election.
Aside from the deal with Microsoft, stand-out moments from Carmony’s tenure as Linspire CEO include the launch of the Freespire community Linux distribution and the recent decision to base Linspire and Freespire on the Ubuntu distribution.
