DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

There was a time when Linux was not just an operating system, but a ticket to Wall Street success. Remember Red Hat, Slashdot, Corel, and the leader of the acquisition-and-IPO pack, VA Linux, whose stock opened with a record-setting gain of 700% and hovers now at NASDAQ’s delisting point, $1/share. (A plot of LNUX share prices so effectively encapsulates the term “dot bomb” that it would send Edward R. Tufte into spasms of joy.) At the time of those acquisitions and IPOs, all sorts of companies were touting Linux, even if it was only peripherally related to their core business, in hopes of pumping up their own image (and share price).

So it seemed like a time warp today to learn of a company called Linux Motor Corp. They look like just-another hosting company (which, from what I can tell by the “pervasive thinning” in the hosting industry over the past two years, has not been a sound business model for a long time either), but dressed up in “open source” robes in hopes of favorable treatment by analysts. But I’m not an authority on these things, so forget my impressions and focus on the issue at hand: linuxmotor.com is run by spammers.

I received an email spam from Marc Gomez of Linux Motor, promoting the company’s web-hosting options. The message was sent to one of my domain-registration addresses. This implies that Linux Motor is harvesting email addresses from “whois” records — a traditional spammer technique for email-address collection.

Now for the irony: if you want to host your website at Linux Motor, you have to agree to their Terms of Service (local mirror), which state in part:

As a provider of Internet network services and management, Linux Motor considers it an obligation to put an end to Spam.

The policy continues with some great stuff: immediate account termination for spammers, to pick one example. They take a strong stand against spam. So I have to wonder, why doesn’t Linux Motor follow this policy themselves?

I’d suspect that some marketing guy acted on his own in launching this spam campaign, except that the name on the spam belongs to the CEO of the company.

Also here’s a confusing sight that tends to cloud Linuxmotor.com’s endorsement of Linux and Open-Source software: not only do they offer Windows 2000 (note: not open-source) as a server OS, they list it under the heading “Linux Hosting.” Elsewhere on the page they list Windows 2000 under “Linux Support.” Err, what? Is this a simple page-design mistake, or evidence of misleading and opportunistic branding?