In this week’s Linspire.com – Linspire Letter, Linspire announces a partnership with Canonical, the commercial supporters of Ubuntu. Linspire/Freespire plans to move their foundation distribution from Debian to Ubuntu, as MEPIS had announced some time ago. Ubuntu, in turn, plans to include CNR (“Click’N Run”) as an additional means of installing software – some free, some commercial, like codecs – into later versions of Ubuntu. This seems like a direct response to Eric S. Raymond’s call for better interoperability with proprietary formats for Linux.
No doubt, “Free as in Freedom” purists will see this as troubling. Pragmatic folks who just want to play their MP3s on Linux may welcome it. Whether this is the move that opens Linux to widespread adoption or destroys the underpinnings of Open Source… only time will tell.