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Linspire Announces Freespire Distribution
LinuxScribe writes "Is the world ready for another community Linux distro a là Fedora and openSUSE? We're about to find out, as Linspire used the Desktop Linux Summit to announce a community-driven version of Linspire, to be called Freespire. But here's the twist, Freespire will come in two flavors: a completely open source version and a version that includes all of the fully-licensed proprietary apps, drivers, and codecs in Linspire."
these shots?
If there are 600 distros, surely you have to accept that people are finding plenty of reasons to create new ones? Surely you don't think you can just declare that they are only faking this need or that they shouldn't do it?
It's easy (if a little arrogant) to look at the total and dismiss the effort as needless, but it's much harder to go through each distro and show that it doesn't fulfill some niche or need.
I picked a load of unpopular ones at random:
An Italian FreeBSD group who wanted a personalizable FreeBSD LiveCD.
An internationalised Red-Hat derivative with better multimedia support.
An improved Knoppix LiveCD for network security testing and forensics.
A completely free Linux system, coordinated by the EC and devoted to multimedia work
A Dutch LiveCD/install cd designed to integrate easily into Windows-based offices.
I'll do even better, I'll give you her address! Right now, she's sleeping with a lot of people though. They're making sure she's clean so if you're worried, you can wait a bit :p
In times like these, it is helpful to remember that there have always been times like these. - Paul Harvey
...a Freespire might be just the ticket for folks who are just not ready for Ubuntu/Kubuntu yet.
Who are these people? I would like to meet one of them. I love Ubuntu and it's my distro of choice, but let's face it: it's almost the fisher price "my first distro" of distros. The only reason why someone wouldn't be ready for it is b/c the name "linux" attached to it scares them.
Does this sig remind you of Agatha Christie?
I thought that his positioning of Freespire and his reasoning behind it are worth sharing with Slashdotters. Linspire is, of course, a purely commercial effort, with the goal of selling a shrink-wrapped OS that looks externally as much like Windows as possible. His target audience is not the Slashdot crowd, but rather the people who buy their computers at Wal-Mart. Really! For them, it's all about the out-of-the-box experience, starting up a computer with preinstalled OS and apps and just using it. As someone who has recently installed Mandriva, Fedora 5, and Ubuntu Breezy on various machines, I think that the experience is much better than it once was, but still falls short of the "Wal-Mart" or even the Windows experience.
To listen to Kevin Carmody, Freespire is offered in the spirit of recognizing the contributions of the open source community, and giving people the opportunity to stay "pure", i.e., without licensed and proprietary pieces, or hybrid, where the user can choose to download and perhaps pay for the licensed and proprietary pieces. He gave an analogy with food, where the choices were Junk Food (Windows and proprietary software), Healthy Food, and Vegan. Open source vegans, of course, are those who would never want music in the proprietary MP3 format or images in the proprietary JPG format.
His belief is that most consumers and business people would like Healthy Food, which is some mix of Linux and those proprietary formats, plus some drivers for graphics cards, etc.. He and his company are actually going out to Fortune 500 companies and talking to them about why they should consider a move to something like Freespire rather than suffering the pain and expense of migrating to Windows Vista (if and when it ever ships). This is a fairly brave, not to say crazy, thing to do, and I think that they deserve some credit and support for their evangelism, even from people who don't care for the whole Linspire business. Getting 3-4% penetration of Linux (any flavor) on corporate desktops would be quite an achievement, and it won't come from Linspire on its own.
Carmody also said that they are going to open source Click N Run because they think that it is the best updating program, and are offering it to others for the taking. If I were responsible for Ubuntu or other Debian-based distros, I would be very tempted to take them up on their offer. I've done enough "apt-get"s.
Your right. Distro bashing is unnecessary, but fun sometimes. ;-) So while your bashing Ubuntu about giving "big support" for "major open source projects", I'll let you in on a little secret. The Ubuntu developers are also the same Debian and Gnome developers. Whatever code they build upon in Ubuntu goes right back to Debian and Gnome and the OSS community at large. They don't throw money at projects, they are the projects. Oh, and by the way, Linspire is built on top of Debian, which is built by the Debian developers who are also the Ubuntu developers.
I only use IE for Windows updates and FireFox for everything else. I've never had an issue accessing any Canadian Federal, Provincial, or Municipal web site. AFAIK, government web sites (here in Canada, anyway) are legislated to be cross platform (i.e. not use any browser specific code).
We may, indeed, share 98% of our genes with chimpanzees, but then, we share 47% with cabbages.