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Freespire is a community-driven, Debian GNU/Linux-based operating system that contains free, open source software (community driven, freely distributed, open source code, etc.), while providing users the choice of including proprietary codecs, drivers and applications as they see fit. Freespire will be used as base for the Linspire operating system.
History In August 2005, a distribution LiveCD based on Linspire's source pools named Freespire hit the web by accident.• This distribution was created by Andrew Betts and was not produced or released by Linspire Inc. Freespire was confused by some users to be an actual product from Linspire, and at the request of Linspire the distribution adopted a development codename Squiggle• and began looking for a new name. Linspire then, on the back of the generated publicity, offered users a "free Linspire" (purchase price discounted to $0) by using the coupon code "Freespire" until September 9 2005, thereby greatly increasing its userbase. Squiggle OS is no longer in active development. On April 24 2006, Linspire announced its own project named "Freespire".• The new Freespire distribution was announced by Linspire President and CEO Kevin Carmony. This follows to the model of Fedora Core being supported by Red Hat and the community since 2003. Novell had also started a similar community project by the name of openSUSE for its SUSE Linux product line in the second half of 2005. On July 14 2006, the first beta release of Freespire became available for download. On August 7, 2006, Freespire 1.0 was released three weeks ahead of schedule. * Open Source Guru Eric S. Raymond joined Freespire Leadership Team on September 27, 2006. Features The distribution is a Debian-based, community-driven and -supported project tied to the commercial Linspire distribution. Freespire includes previously proprietary elements from Linspire, such as the CNR Client, while other elements, which Linspire itself licenses but does not own, like the Windows Media Audio compatibility libraries, remain closed-source. Consequently there are two versions of Freespire, one with the closed source libraries, and one, called Freespire OSS Edition, that includes only open-source components. Unlike Linspire version 5 and earlier, Freespire does not enable the root account by default. Instead, it gives sudo rights to all members of the admin group. However, people claim that this is not an improvement due to the fact that users can become superuser without entering a password.• Future Freespire 2.0 (which, as of October 18, 2006, is currently under development) is slated for release in 1st Quarter 2007. This will be the first version of Freespire to include the new open-source CNR client.* Links | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
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