Red Herring: Linspire Founder on Linux, iPod Sep 6, 2006, 18 :45 UTC (0 Talkback[s]) (5730 reads)
"Q: And you have a novel approach even within the Linux community in that, you do incorporate some proprietary code to help improve the multimedia experience for users. Some have argued that might violate the spirit of free and open software. Do some people in the open source community need to loosen up?
"A: I think without question if you want to go mainstream you have to recognize that people want to watch Flash movies or play MP3 tracks or Windows Media Tracks, you have to see that and if you don't, you're simply hurting yourself. The purists have really protested any sort of mainstreaming of Linux, and because of that, you can't walk in to the average computer store today and buy a Linux laptop. We've had five or ten years of doing it the purist way, and now I think its time to combine the power of Open Source with proprietary code, because [it] simply is fundamentally core to the internet experience..."
