Is GOS dead?

[Scotchpie]

No this isn't a philosophical question with a typo. I'm talking about the Ubuntu based distro GOS.

A couple of years ago it was the darling of the linux world and the default distro on those $199 Everex PCs sold by Walmart.

Nothing on their website has changed for quite some time. They're still promoting "Cloud" which was released in December 2008 and their company history page stops at January 2009 with the release of "Gadgets" or GOS 3.1. Their blog hasn't had an entry posted since March 2009 and the last tweet was May 2009 simply saying "Micoblogging is Cool."

So is GOS dead? Did they go bankrupt or something?

[BuffaloX]

I find nothing on Google if I limit search results to a year.
So it doesn't look good.

[ST3ALTHPSYCH0]

Distrowatch lists it as "active", but says that it hasn't been updated since June of '09.

[Scotchpie]

Just been to a GOS forum and quite a few recent posters refer to it as "abandonware" with no explanation given from the company for the lack of updates or new releases.

Looks like the name of its last distro "Cloud" was quite prophetic as that's were is appears to have gone.

[Sporkman]

I vaguely remember hearing that gOS was a crappy linux implementation...

[Legendary_Bibo]

Maybe they partnered with google for chromeOS

[squilookle]

It wasn't the best implementation of a Linux desktop I ever encountered, but I thought it had alot of potential.

This is a shame.

[tgalati4]

Walmart dropped the line because they got too many complaints: "Hey this isn't Windows!"

[Scotchpie]

I feel sorry for those hired by GOS last year. One of their last tweets was about them recruiting new staff.

I didn't like GOS either but thought the company had more going for itself and would have survived longer than just a couple of years.

[ronnielsen1]

I vaguely remember hearing that gOS was a crappy linux implementation...


I thought it was a super fast implementation myself. We used it for about 6 months

[gnomeuser]

gOS struck me as being a good idea but fairly poorly implemented and executed. They released many different versions and seemed without a consistent vision for where they were going.

Things like MySpace integration isn't really useful today when people want Facebook (and the wise of us, Diaspora*) integration. The idea though is good but it is doomed to failure unless they manage to lead a successful open source project to create the required tools and libraries to make these connections.

Where gOS failed I believe that MeeGo will succeed (in terms of social integration). Ubuntu is also going in this direction and it would not surprise me to see Unity gain some of these features.