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First Impressions of Freespire 1.0

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the tapping-a-market dept.

Nate writes "Freespire 1.0 was released a few days ago, taking the desktop-oriented Linspire distribution and making it freely available (as in beer) to the world. Linux Format has some first impressions of the release, focusing on its much-trumpeted media playback facilities thanks to codec licensing. Flash, Java, DVD and WMV support out-the-box — could this climb to the top of the desktop distro ladder?"

1 of 201 comments (clear)

  1. Re:OK, just how GPL compliant is it??? by yuna49 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    No, you have no redistribution rights whatsoever for the proprietary components. See
    http://wiki.freespire.org/index.php/Summary_of_Pro prietary_Components. There's an "OSS" version that contains none of the proprietary items and is, presumably, redistributable.

    I'm really puzzled by all of this. First, why would Microsoft license its WMV technologies to a Linux distribution? I can understand someone like Sun licensing Java, or ATI/nVidia licensing their drivers, but Microsoft? Why would they want to make it easier for a Linux distribution to compete with Windows, especially in an area where Microsoft has the advantage, namely bundling proprietary software?

    Second, who is paying the licensing fees here? I presume that Linspire has to pay royalties for each download of Freespire. Where is the money coming from? On the wiki site, Linspire says it's paying for things like server space, etc., but doesn't really talk about the licensing fees. Are they really making so much money that they can afford to pay royalties but not be compensated by end-users in return?