Linspire Creates Freespire Desktop Linux Project

Published: May 2, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Linux on the commercial desktop is what Linspire is all about, but it is tough for any company in the Linux business these days to not have a community development model and consider itself credible. Red Hat has Fedora, Novell has openSUSE, and now Linspire has Freespire.

Because the Linspire variant of Debian Linux has a bunch of proprietary software that makes it of value--drivers, codecs, and other software that Linspire has created to make Linux more Windows friendly--it is tough to take the whole product open source and not help seed competitors. But the Freespire project does the next best thing, taking the core Linux implementation to a community development process. While Linspire is not making the source code for these unique bits of these extensions to Debian available, the Freespire participants--and indeed, anyone who wants to build their own Linspire instance--will be given the tools to find these bits and add them to their Freespire implementation. This is a mix of the open source software and the free software distribution methods.

Freespire is also a broader implementation than Linspire, inasmuch as Linspire is aimed predominantly at former Windows users and comes with a lot of features preset. Freespire is aimed at developers as well as end users and will have a lot more configuration options. However, if you want a certified version of the software for a particular machine, then you will need to choose Linspire--or do your own support with Freespire. One more thing: Now that Freespire is a community development project, it is possible that Linspire will be able to--with the help of outside developers--forge a server variant of its desktop operating system. Why not?