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David Johnson wrote:
Yep, I tried their Skype type application that they released - Gizmo I think it's called. Great, I can get the sources, but it wouldn't compile for AMD64 on Ubuntu. Tried Skype (32-bit CHROOT) and it worked a treat. Yeah, Skype is proprietory, but it worked!On Thursday 27 April 2006 09:02, Tom Potts wrote:Alas its worse than that: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20060424164142296 TomThat's a pretty good article.The main problem I have with Lin/Freespire, in addition to their love for proprietary software, is that they take a lot from the community (i.e. the Free Software available through their Click'n'Run warehouse, which Linspire users have to pay to access) and give *nothing* back. Even when they do release something as Free/open source (because they're required to do so because they've used GPL'd code) they make it unacceptably difficult for people to use the source they make available - e.g. sources which don't compile, apps which have silly dependencies on things in Linspire so you can't use them on other distros, etc. etc.
As far as I'm aware when they modify a piece of software they don't send their changes to the original developer for inclusion like other distros do, they just chuck the source somewhere and forget about it.
Thats not good is it.
Not only do they support and sell proprietary software, but they develop the stuff too. An example being Lassist Reminders[1] for which they charge $49.95 and do not publish the source.I've had e-mails from Linspire before about their re-packaged OpenOffice with a different name. From what I could tell, it was OpenOffice in a shiney box with a different name.It will be interesting to see how many people contribute to their "community-driven" distribution. Linspire have never paid any attention to the community before, so I can only hope the community returns the favour.Regards, David. [1] http://tinyurl.com/zvtx4
I remember when Michael Robertson used to go on about how wonderful Click-n-run in Linspire was. Yeah, it may be good, but it aint free like Yum or Apt-get/Synaptic is it?
Latest e-mail I had from Michael Robertson was about some new Office suite thats been written in Ajax to run in a browser. I wonder how long it'll be before they start charging for advanced features (i.e. basic features on OOo or MS Word).
If I want a community OS, I'll stick to the likes of Debian & Ubuntu. Rob - The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG Mail majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe list" in the message body to unsubscribe. FAQ: www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html