Friday, May 05, 2006

Up Coming Star






I was very joyous to hear that Linspire announced a no-cost version of their popular desktop Linux operating system, called Freespire. Freespire is a community driven and developed project, offering a Linux distribution that is free to download and share. Freespire is about choice. The user should be free to decide what software they want to install on their systems, be that proprietary or open source. Linspire continues to fully embrace and supports the open source model. Linspire will be releasing two versions of Freespire, one described as "99% open source" and the second completely open source. Linspire made its name by shunning the ideal of pure open source, opting rather for a system that was for the masses, out of the box it just worked– whether that requires proprietary software in the mix or not. Now the purists can have their Linspire without compromising their principles , and that every one else gets access to the large amount of proprietary software in Linspire's repository, CNR (Click and Run). And your DVDs will play, too.
I'm not here to make a case that Linspire Five-0 is the best Linux distribution on the web, however as a corporation they have done a lot for the open source movement. Linspire is a supporter of open source projects through conference sponsorships, financial support, and code development. Linspire is a big supporter projects like Mozilla and Firefox. All the changes Linspire makes are open source and the code is made available to be put in the main tree. Linspire is the lead sponsor of the Mozdev.org website and the main sponsor of the Freespire project.

Linspire contributes all changes to Mozilla, Firefox, Lsongs, Lphoto, Nvu, KDE, WINE, Debian, etc. back to these projects as well as making the source code available.

Linspire is available pre-installed on hundreds of different computers, and distributed nationwide. Having Linux pre-installed on computers like Koobox, available at retail is key for the success of desktop/laptop Linux. As a corporation Linspire is doing a superior job reaching out to the non-technical mass markets than other Linux distributions. You can get a review of Koobox here...

Freespire will help Linspire O.S. serve the retail market better. Work that goes into Freespire, will find its way into commercial Linspire product line. I live in the Inter-City and times can be hard for some. I'm sure most low income people don’t plan to go into debt or getting a bootleg of any new Windows XP/ Vista innovations. This site is to inform people of their choices. Mainstream media has failed in this task.

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