Freespire Lives, Goes Back To Debian

nerdyH writes "Following Xandros's acquisition of Linspire, some feared for the future of Freespire, the free version of Linspire. However, Xandros today announced a new version of Freespire that will return the popular free Linux distro to its Debian-based roots."

Comments

Chile

[westlake]

This must be some strange new meaning of the word "popular" that I was not previously aware of.
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Chile has a population of 17 million and a per capita income of $14,000 a year. Chile

In 2006 Chile had 1 million broadband users - not bad for a country that didn't have DSL or cable Internet service before the year 2000.

The "e-business" potential of the country looks quite good.A Wired Country

Re:Chile

[dedazo]

One of the things to remember about countries like Chile (and Argentina, Venezuela, Mexico, etc) is that there's a HUGE divide between the upper and lower middle class, in the sense that there's no true middle class like there is in the US, Canada or Germany. They also tend to suffer from unregulated state-owned monopolies that have subtle effects on the spread of technology. For example, in the 90s getting on the Internet in Mexico was extremely expensive because of a stupid charge-per-call rule the state telephony company had. If your modem was dropping connections, you were in for pain at the end of the month when the bill arrived. I remember having to call home and ask my dad for more money just to pay the damn phone bill.

All this has the effect of putting the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder at a disadvantage. So the availability of cheap hardware running cheap software is important, because it offsets costs like electricity and broadband. There are retailers in Santiago, Caracas and Buenos Aires that will sell you essentially the same machines Dell or Gateway sell in the US. Trust me, those are not contributing to the tech revolution down there. It's the little mom and pop shops that sell crappy boxes with Linux (or pirated Windows...) that are doing that.

Re:Xandros and Linspire

[J053]

sudo su

sudo -i

Re:libdvdcss

[squiggleslash]

This is actually untrue. The DMCA states it's illegal to make, possess, or import something that circumvents an access control mechanism or a copy control mechanism. It does not tie the prohibition to copying.

There are no distros of any visibility in the US that bundle libdvdcss that haven't been licensed in some way. It is probably that the DVD CCA would take a pragmatic view and not sue at this point, largely because it's easy for an end user to circumvent the ban anyway and because while its damaging to other manufacturers of DVD players that they have to pay CSS license fees when unauthorized distributors of libdvdcss do not, it certainly isn't damaging to Hollywood that people be able to play DVDs on GNU/Linux based computers, and at this stage the law of diminishing returns would apply when trying to push a lawsuit. But I certainly wouldn't gamble a business's livelihood on the DVD CCA's likely liberalism.