Feb

8

Free OS for Human Beings made more feasible?

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Today I learned that Linspire and Canonical have just announced a significant partnership. Both companies produce a Debian-based desktop distribution, but they approach the problem of bringing Linux to the masses differently. Ubuntu proclaims to be first and foremost a Free Software distribution, while Linspire boasts with its proprietary drivers and codecs to make all the evil file formats and mystery hardware work out of the box.

A combination of both would be ideal from the user’s point of view, wouldn’t it? Free OS for humans who just wants stuff to work. This deal could bring such an OS closer to Ubuntu users. Here’s the shortest possible version of the FAQ issued by the companies:

  • In the future, Linspire will be based on Ubuntu rather than directly on Debian
  • Linspire’s Click-N-Run service will be available on Ubuntu so that users can easily get proprietary drivers multimedia codecs and applications on their systems

I don’t know enough about Linspire to be able to say much about what this means to them. It might well be easier for them to build desktop-only systems on Ubuntu and have some of the Humanization work already done for them.

For Ubuntu, the integration of CNR could solve one of the most pressing problems: the Evil Proprietary Driver and Codec problem.

  • Canonical can ship a 100% free distribution and users will know their operating system is not evil when they install it
  • Users can, if they wish, easily install whatever proprietary stuff they need / want and purchase appropriate licenses for them (if Click-N-Run lives up to its name, it must be easy). No more system and upgrade breakage after newbies try to find and install their “essential” flash plugin or WMA codec.

So, all in all this is probably a good deal for both distributions and companies, and the users of both.

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