Freespire Linux Project Opens Up a Month Early

Published: August 15, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Here's one you don't hear very often: A software project that comes out a month early. But Linspire, the company that has created a version of the Debian Linux variant that has been tamed so Windows desktop users have a clue how to use it, announced last week that its Freespire project is getting its 1.0 release out the door as of August 10, about a month earlier than planned.

The Freespire project was started at the end of April to open up the Linspire variant of Debian, which had some proprietary technology in it that many open source purists have an allergy to. Specifically, Linspire includes peripheral drivers, codecs, fonts, WiFi networking, and other software that made Linux either work better on the desktop than it otherwise would or made it look and act more like a Windows desktop, which most of the world is familiar with.

After listening to complaints about the mixing of open and closed source software, Linspire decided that it would do what it thought was best, which was launch the Freespire project to open source its Linux variant and then provide some of these proprietary bits as free binaries for those who wanted to plug them into Freespire. Equally important, the Freespire project allows others to create open source, free, or proprietary extensions to the Freespire Debian variant, and distribute them as they see fit. While Freespire is free, Linspire is the version of the software that has been tweaked for a particular set of platforms and that comes with installation and technical support.

Linspire was founded in 2001 and you will remember it for its original product name--Lindows. The company was sued by Microsoft--and Microsoft lost the case and an appeal and eventually settled in July 2004 with Linspire, paying it $20 million.

Freespire 1.0 is one of the things that is being announced this week at LinuxWorld. The Freespire 1.0 OSS Edition is the one that does not include any proprietary software. If you want to use such software with your Freespire setup, you click a button and it goes out to the site and adds it to your machine. The Freespire site will be how future, community-developed versions of Linspire are created, echoing the development methods that Red Hat, Novell, and Sun Microsystems have initiated to create their commercialized software.

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