Eric Raymond Joins Freespire [LWN.net]

Eric Raymond Joins Freespire

Posted Sep 27, 2006 18:56 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333)
Parent article: Eric Raymond Joins Freespire

MHaHahaha.

Maybe now he'll convince Linspire to port their Clink'n'Run interface over to other operating systems, especially Ubuntu and instead of trying to make money off of selling Linspire (which I would still tell them to do), but make money for charging for the service.

Then with the click'n'run the problem with handling propriatory software distribution with Linux systems in a easy and managable way would be solved and it doesn't have to realy involve Free software folks.

Also it would be usefull for Free software packages that aren't realy suitable for distributions to handle as packages.. such as video games that are updated very frequently or have very complex dependancy issues.

Other companies could use it to hock their wares.. such as Fluendo with their propriatory gstreamer plugins.

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Eric Raymond Joins Freespire

Posted Sep 28, 2006 7:04 UTC (Thu) by irios (guest, #19838) [Link]

I believe Linspire has *already* published the click-n-run software as GPL, so it is Ubuntu that should do the porting (if they are interested).

Eric Raymond Joins Freespire

Posted Sep 28, 2006 9:44 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Not realy.

The only reason why you'd want click'n'run is to support selling propriatory software. It doesn't matter what the license for the sofware that the service uses is.

Why would you expect a bunch of developers for a Free software distribution to vollenteer to make you money by going through the pain of porting and supporting software so end users could more easily subscribe to your service to be sold propriatory software?

Nope. Doesn't make sense for Ubuntu to do that. It's not their job. The ball is entirely in Linspire's court. They would make the money from the subscriptions so they can hire the developers to support it. I expect that Ubuntu would be willing to make allowences for them, but not to jump through any hoops.