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I agree. Two levels would have been enough, instead of four.

Freespire will eventually replace Linspire I think. Paid Linux will disappear. Even Red Hat follows the pay-for-support model.

Actually you can not get Red Hat software though without paying upfront for the support. Which is no different then buying Linspire. Which is why free third party versions of Red Hats OS's have gotten so popular like CentOS. Because without the paid subscription you can not download actual Red Hat products (Besides Fedora)

I think Linspire will stay around because Linspire is trying to user Freespie like Open Suse and Fedora. Have a community version, roll up the best changes and features to your stable product and then sell the stable product with long term support. Same model all the major companies are now using (Novell with open suse, Red Hat with Fedora, Ubuntu with their regular version and LTS versions.) Cause short term service and support comes with the default price of Linspire and then you pay for CNR gold and you get update and long term support and access to software in one place.

Your right about RedHat of course, but up until just a month or so ago you could sign up for a free 3 month trial and download any of the RHEL ISOs and get 3 moths of updates. Not sure what the reasoning was but I'm assuming that since there is CentOS, WhiteBox, StartCom, Tao, etc. it was no longer necessary.

My personal opinion of Lin/Freespire is that I like the model. i don't mind paying for update services, however, some of their actions I find totally reprehensible, such as rebranding OSS software and not giving proper credit, as well as the "run as root" nonsense from their past versions.

Everyone on has done rebranding of some sort at some point. Like novell rebrands OpenOffice. The products that Linspire rebranded were products they ether added code to or made changes to for the Linspire OS. And that rebranding is allowed by the GPL. I had no problem with it as long as you could go into the credits area and see what it really was.

The whole root thing I think was blown way out of proportion. The only version of Linspire that was stuck with the whole root thing was 3. (Since they never actually came out with a version 1 or 2) Once 4 came out you always had an option to make more user at the first start up and when you first logged in for each user.

I think their big problem was that they started out as a for profit company with no open source roots (Even though Xandros did the same thing) and that lead to having a lack of open development and a lack of taking ideas from their community.

With Freespire all of this should change!

The one thing I give them respect for is the fact that they were the only company so far to make a real run at Apple and MS in the home market. No other Linux company has done that. Xandros and Ubuntu, Mandrake and Mepis etc all have "home" versions but none of them have made the home market their stated goal! Buy getting system builders etc on board and focusing on the home market.

Edited 2006-07-30 03:55

such as rebranding OSS software and not giving proper credit,

I don't know about other products, but Linspire was *forced* to not use the name Firefox for its browser by the Mozilla org. The code changes Linspire does to Firefox were too great, and hence they are not allowed to use the Firefox name.

4 levels to get to OpenOffice?
They are just cloning windows start menu.
It has nothing to do with usability.

I wouldn't call this desktop "ugly", but I agree that it's not eye-candy at all. Colors weren't chosen carefully I guess.