Linspire Announces Freespire Distribution
Submitted by srlinuxx on Mon, 04/24/2006 - 13:36.
Is the world ready for another community Linux distro?
That's the question being asked and answered today at the 4th Annual Desktop Linux Summit. Once known as a community-supported alternative to the Linspire distribution, the Freespire name is about to rise again from the ashes of obscurity--only this time as a distro completely sponsored and endorsed by Linspire itself.
The new Freespire distro was announced Monday by Linspire President and CEO Kevin Carmony during his keynote address to Summit attendees. Freespire will be a Debian-based, community-driven and -supported project tied to the commercial Linspire distribution, Carmony outlined, in much the same way as Fedora Core and openSUSE relate to their parent commercial distros, Red Hat Linux and SUSE Linux, respectively.
But there the similarity ends and Linspire is being quite vocal in outlining the differences.
Much of what makes Linspire unique amongst Linux distributions is its focus on the desktop and the company's willingness to incorporate fully-licensed versions of proprietary software and drivers that allow end-users to perform operations--such as viewing a movie on DVD media legally in the US--that might not be afforded to users of other distributions.
This approach has tended to polarize some members of the Linux community away from Linspire since it does not maintain a "pure" open-source philosophy, according to Carmony, who spoke with LinuxPlanet prior to his keynote address today. But, at the same time, these proprietary applications and codecs make Linspire (and therefore Linux) more attractive to end-users and developers from outside the Linux community.
Which is why Freespire will be released in two flavors: a completely open-source only version, which will not have any proprietary software packages, and a version that contains the legally licensed versions of proprietary software.
Market analysis of Linux operating system ?
RedHat has 290 million dollar revenue. Novell has about the same, but Suse is only about a tenth of Novell's revenue. Both are server operating system business. Mandriva has club revenue which is not penetrating into the oveall market of computer operating system, because of lack of installed base(number of computers solely using Mandriva).
What all sucessful operating system vendors have is a sales force which parked at the wealthy business customers' doors. Mandriva did not, because it is a desktop operating system. It is not selling into a server dominated business market where potential customers have buying power.
Servers are virtual desktops. Therefore, Fedora still failed to couple to Enterprise v4.0 or RH 7.2/3. Suse has not been able to couple to Novell network system yet; too many bugs prevented them to fully implement the coupling. Linspire had no server business to couple to, and Freespire will not get the customer's installed base either. The installed base is 27% of all the IT departments in all business corporations, who still use Win95/98. These desktops are still using perhaps, Novell network system and windows95/98. Microsoft has all the installed base of new computer supplied by OEM manufacturers.
So, all the kings men ain't going to make open source muscles of bug fixing sufficient, to gain a market that depends on server software installed base. Ajax websites are developing. Ebay and Paypal has many security issues that Linux can not address(with trusted coupling). Banking also needs tight trusted coupling on the net. So, more years of financially struggling Linux is to be expected.
Footnote:
Trusted coupling is shared credentials of software list(checksum), cookies, password, location, listed telephone number(caller id), ISP, and software usage habits; determined by artificial intelligence and fuzzy logic. Records of credentials in servers, determine the level of privilege desktop user can exercise. This security coupling should not be in the browser, but in the server packet switching via 500 packet format as keys. Desktop operating system can sell a firewall software to servers to use packet switching security.
More footnote:
With Suse 10.2RC2 having three levels of operating system coming into play, some of the Win95/98 usage maybe taken over. They need additional security protection beyond cookies and password to couple to servers.