First Impressions of Freespire 1.0

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?"

Comments

Time will tell

[suggsjc]

Flash, Java, DVD and WMV support out-the-box

Maybe a good start, but it will take a lot more than that to

climb to the top of the desktop distro ladder

Granted I would think that Linux users are more likely to try different flavors, but to really get to the top takes a lot of time and effort. Slashvertisements might get a couple people to jump, but rises in distros are probably a more organic thing that happens from a solid product (think Ubuntu).

Re:Time will tell

[dsginter]

That's all great but can you tell me the easiest method of getting Ubuntu up to speed with all the codecs, DVD-playback, flash, et cetera... LEGALLY?

The available scripts out there (Automatix, EasyUbuntu, etc) are not legal in the United States thanks to the patent quagmire. This preempts the use of the distribution in a large way (e.g. - most businesses simply can't afford to break the law, no matter how wrong it is).

That said, I *would* like a suggestion to this issue. I'd really like to get up and running on Linux legally. Freespire seems appealing in this respect.

Why are these things even an issue?

[SanityInAnarchy]

On a fresh Gentoo install:

emerge mplayer kmplayer firefox kde netscape-flash blackdown-jre blackdown-jdk xine-ui vlc

That should give you everything, free as in beer. It'll boot fast, too, if you tweak a couple of settings -- I know it supports running init scripts in parallel, a nice little feature of having init scripts state their dependencies, instead of a strict order.

The downside is, of course, that you have to wait probably at least one full day for all of this stuff to compile from scratch.

But seriously, Gentoo doesn't seem to have nearly the problems I hear of other distros having with licensing. Is there really such a legal difference between distributing ebuilds (which contain download URLs for the codecs) and distributing the codecs themselves in debs? Could debs include download URLs?

Re:OK, just how GPL compliant is it???

[PurpleMonkeyKing]

From their website, they seem to have a GPL compliant version and a free (as in beer) proprietary version, much like OpenSuse 10.0 was.

Here's a list of the licensed proprietary compenents. Under nearly every one it says explicitly that you are not granted redistobution rights.

Basically, I guess if you want to legally redistribute it you'd need get this one. Since it doesn't have the proprietary codecs, though, I think you'd be better off with Ubuntu.

Re:OK, just how GPL compliant is it???

[yuna49]

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?