Originally announced by San Diego, California-based Linspire in April, the first Freespire version was not scheduled for release until September but has been delivered ahead of schedule.
It is available in two versions: the standard community-developed Freespire, and also Freespire OSS, a version stripped of the proprietary binary extensions, codecs, and applications that have become a trademark of Linspire’s approach to Linux.
While some free and open source software advocates believe that there is not place for proprietary software in a Linux distribution, Linspire has taken the view that providing technologies such as Windows Media and Apple’s Quicktime under proper licenses enables ease of use and attracts new users to the Linux desktop.
Freespire provides a free marketplace for any and all Linux software, including proprietary, open source, free, and commercial products, said Kevin Carmony, Linspire CEO. As with any free market, all vendors are free to participate and offer their wares, and buyers are free to choose from the different wares without limitations or restrictions on their choice.
For Linspire this market place has been provided by the CNR Warehouse, a software delivery service designed to enable single-click Linux software installation. A new CNR Client is included in Freespire, ahead of the release of a new open source CNR version.
While the Freespire distribution is freely available and developed by the community, Linspire will continue to release commercial versions of the Linux desktop based on the Freespire code, replicating a model first started by Red Hat Inc with Fedora/Red Hat Enterprise Linux and also used by Mandriva SA with Cooker/Mandriva Linux, and Novell Inc with openSUSE/SUSE Linux Enterprise.
