If you are curious about the significance of Open Source in the world today, I've tried to answer some of those concerns in the top two links on the blogroll to your right; other fine links appear throughout, though particular attention should be paid to the lower half of said blogroll.
I normally will just not write about an Open Source operating system if it just isn't up to snuff; but in this case I decided to make an exception--especially since the maker of the operating system in question, Linspire, has inspired so much acrimony and ill will in the Open Source community by signing a 'patent protection' agreement with Microsoft.
An added bonus is that in recent days, the CEO of Linspire, Kevin Carmony, accused other Linux distributions of 'software piracy'; while not naming names of the distributions in question, there was little doubt that he was referring to Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, as well as several others--which is especially odd considering that he has an agreement with those companies to provide proprietary software to all of those companies through Linspire's patented 'Click 'N Run' software warehouse.
Linspire is a commercial Linux distribution that must have some users and still be in active development; they also recently decided to switch their operating system base to that of Ubuntu, and they appear on Distrowatch as being active.
Freespire is the free version of Linspire, and while being a no doubt very polished looking distribution (aka distro, or operating system) has some very serious flaws.
Now my natural reaction to this diatribe
The Moral High Ground
Lastly...some distributions have come out, claiming to be taking the "morale high ground" by refusing to give into "Microsoft threats," while openly promoting the means of circumventing proprietary software on their web sites, amounting to nothing more than high-brow software piracy.
was to set up a few, ahem, technical hurdles to shall we say give a slightly rougher time to this distribution; Microsoft claims it has 235 patents that Linux is infringing upon, Linspire gets some much needed cash from Microsoft, Linspire then accuses other distributions of 'software piracy', thus linking Linux to the larger RIAA/MPAA scheme of calling everyone who shares anything, legitimate or not 'pirates'. Kind of a neat trick, while counting the 30 pieces of silver from Microsoft, it occurs to him that Linux=Piracy!!!!!!. Just a coincidence, surely, and he is speaking from the moral high ground. Mwahahahahahaha.
But that just wouldn't be sporting, and way against the spirit of the Open Source movement--if they have a fine product, then let it shine! I proceeded to load Freespire into vmware-server, alloting 512M of ram, and then booted it up.
While the boot process was not swift, it might be going overboard to refer to it as ponderously slow, that would be overstating things by just a tad, though perhaps after using Gentoo my judgment was somewhat colored, speed demon that it is.
I really wanted to be impressed, so I stopped the machine, and upped the ram another 256M, it was now going to run on 768M, enough for anything I have ever tried, including SabayonLinux and OpenSuse, monstrously large liveCDs/DVDs; again, I just couldn't wait for the boot process to get finished, so I went one step further in the test and burned the ISO file to a CD; surely this would work.
At last I was able to get a somewhat working desktop, in that I could see the desktop, and all the shininess that it presented. And shiny it was, for all of five seconds--it was suddenly blotted out by something I have never until now seen on a Open Source distribution--an End User License Agreement (EULA).
Horror of horrors! I wanted that shiny desktop back, and the EULA contained many arcane legal terms that I didn't likely read carefully enough; so, without further ado (always wanted to use that phrase, and now I have) I clicked I agree, and was allowed to see the shiny once more.
I then clicked on the icon for Firefox, and waited, and waited, and waited, a full two minutes plus, and no response. Tried a second time, and the same result. Was about to give up, but what the heck, once more into the breach, tried a third time, and still no luck.
OK, probably a problem with Firefox, and nothing to do with this oh so shiny Open Source distribution; lets see how it handles my music files. I opened up LSongs, the default music player for this fine system, and it played the two songs included no problem.
Not really my taste, so I loaded up James Brown (a legally purchase CD) and his greatest hits, wanting to rip and burn the mp3s to disk and then burn them. My realization that this was in liveCD mode was interrupted by Firefox finally launching, more than five minutes after I had clicked the icon. Again, probably due to the fact that it is a beta, and a liveCD, and not as well done as one would want.
Launching k3b, the music burning software did little except bring up an error message: 'could not access dcop server' or something like that; getting a little tired of the non-responsiveness, I went back to the nicely styled 'Launch' (very reminiscent of XP's 'Start' menu) when things really went haywire--the system completely froze up, and I was forced to hard reboot, again a first in the many distributions I have tried.
Not to be deterred, I restarted into the liveCD mode, waited a while for the boot screen to dump me into the EULA, agreed a second time (now that will be two first-borns due Linspire!), and waited the requisite time for Firefox, now knowing what to expect. Was finally rewarded with the launch, and being deposited on the Freespire home page. Decided to visit youtube, and then Firefox just disappeared. No mention of a crash, no message window, just disappeared. Ah, well. Enough time spent on that.
Rebooted into Gentoo, tossing the disk under a nearby drink (good for something at least), and sat down to write this. Cost of Freespire: Nada. Aggravation factor of time wasted: around an eleven (on a scale of ten). Seeing the 'moral high ground' and the product of that lofty environment: priceless.
One wonders if more time was spent in actual development of this clearly very shiny, but for all purposes non-functional distribution, and less time was spent on the aforementioned 'moral high ground' spreading the Microsoft message of Linux=Piracy!!! whether something good could be had. The world will never know. Such a pity. Or rather, such shame. Not so highly recommended.