surprise move?
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| incinerator Aug 31, 2006 1:47 AM EDT |
I don't know why this comes as a surprise to so many people. linspire announced all this earlier in the year when they made their press releases about freespire. |
| boborooster Sep 01, 2006 8:31 AM EDT |
--- le boborooster entree This person attended LW in SF and received too many copies of Freespire. Verily, piles of these CDs were easily available to all attendees. At LWSF, there were competitors to Freespire present, and this free CNR comes as little surprise to many of us there. Competitors present included K/Ubuntu, Novell's SLED (and OpenSUSE), Fedora, the Debian booth in the corner, FreeBSD near Debian, Xandros ... etc. The Linspire/Freespire team had a room all too itself at LWSF and this fact was promoted to attendees via the CD-handouts and the raffles announced on the Expo floor. Perhaps remaining objections to Linspire can be summarized as follows: 1. Linspire/Freespire includes binaries not under the GPL. See other more extensive (and passionate) LXer comments on this subject elsewhere other than in this response. 2. Linspire/Freespire's current decision to provide free its CNR service is suspicious, and its not doing so before indicates that apologies are certainly due. It seems to moi that Linspire/Freespire almost HAD to offer free CNR service regardless of free updates also available via apt-get or similar open source packages. Linspire and Freespire are currently ranked 30th and 37th respectively on the DistroWatch.com site. These ranking are well below that of the other distros listed above, for those who use such rankings as measurements of a distro's success. Its now-free CNR service can possibly help it climb the rankings and possibly surpass Xandros, the latter which still charges $$$ for packaged versions other than its 30-day demo. Likely that Linspire too will continue to charge its fee for CD/DVD media, packaging, manuals and continued full support for its core Linspire product. OTOH, Freespire is to remain a completely libre distro available by download and supported by online community offerings similar to Debian, OpenSUSE and FC. --- So says le boborooster, and not le Donald. Firez-vous away! |
| incinerator Sep 04, 2006 12:47 AM EDT |
good post boborooster. A couple of extra points: - I'm happy that with Freespire there is one more "libre" GNU/Linux distro out there. - I'm not happy that linspire is doing that. I don't like their business model. I don't like that made a deal with microsoft. I do not trust them. Imho they just use freespire to lure users into their "non-free" linspire business model. - I'm not happy that freespire simply ignores certain licensing issues with non-free software, like nvidia/ati drivers etc. Their approach is to ignore these issues, using the excuse of trying to make "the customers happy". This way, we'll never convince ati/nvidia and the likes to provide Free Software drivers (or alternatively, documentation that enables others to write these drivers) for their products. |
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