Canonical Ltd. and Linspire, Inc. today announced plans for a
technology partnership that integrates core competencies from each
company into the other’s open source Linux offerings.
Linspire will transition from Debian to Ubuntu as the base for
their Linspire and Freespire desktop operating systems. This
will mean that Linspire users will benefit from Ubuntu’s fast
moving development cycles and focus on usability. The Freespire
community will start seeing early releases of Freespire 2.0 based
on Ubuntu in the first quarter of 2007, with the final release
expected in the 2nd quarter of 2007, following the official release
of Ubuntu 7.04 in April.
“Ubuntu is the most successful community-based Linux project to
date,” said Kevin Carmony, CEO of Linspire. “They have done a
fantastic job with the development community and creating tools for
utilizing their technology. It made a tremendous amount of sense to
partner with Canonical and begin basing our desktop Linux offerings
on Ubuntu.”
Linspire will continue combining proprietary drivers, codecs and
applications with open source software by default in their
operating systems. This approach, unique among Linux distributions,
offers out-of-the-box support for a broader range of software,
hardware and multimedia file types than the Debian or Ubuntu
baseline alone. Linspire will continue adding other unique features
that are important to its users and that make the Linspire desktop
Linux easy to use and a turn-key solution for OEMs.
“This technology partnership goes a long way in advancing and
unifying the Linux desktop,” said Carmony. “Linux faces many
challenges as it competes in a world historically dominated by
Microsoft Windows, so there is plenty of work to go around and
we’re pleased to be able to offer
differentiation and choice, while reducing fragmentation.”
“The very nature of Free Software development is based on
sharing and collaboration,” commented Mark Shuttleworth, founder of
Ubuntu. “The less time, energy and resources Canonical and Linspire
spend duplicating efforts, the more time we’ll all have for unique
improvements and innovation. We’re pleased to see another key Linux
distribution incorporating our work
with Ubuntu.”
In addition, Ubuntu users will gain access to the Linspire CNR
e-commerce and software delivery technology. Linspire recently
announced plans to make their CNR technology available for other
Linux distributions in addition to their own Linspire and Freespire
offerings. Today’s announcement confirms that Ubuntu will be the
first distribution to be supported.
Beginning with Ubuntu’s 7.04 release in
April of this year, Ubuntu users will be able to use the CNR client
to download and install commercial programs and proprietary media
drivers with one click of the mouse. In the future, Canonical plans
to integrate aspects of the CNR technology so the purchase of
commercial software is straightforward for desktop users.
“Over the past few years, Linspire has refined their e-commerce
and software delivery technology with their CNR service,” continued
Shuttleworth. “For some time, we’ve been planning enhancements to
Ubuntu’s commercial software management, and it was only natural to
take advantage of Linspire’s new, open CNR technology rather than
duplicating that work.”
Ubuntu users will continue to have the same repository and
installation options as before, but will enjoy expanded
capabilities with the incorporation of the new CNR technology
features such as access to a range of commercial consumer
applications, multimedia support and games.
“This partnership will
enable us to provide commercial software products and services such
as legally licensed DVD and media players to users who want them.”
noted Steve George, Director of Support and Services for
Canonical.