Red Herring: Linspire Founder on Linux, iPod

“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…”

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