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Freespire is a community-driven Linux distribution which is composed entirely of Free and open source software, while providing users the choice of including proprietary software including multimedia codecs, device drivers and application software as they see fit.

Freespire is originally derived from Linspire, a commercial operating system based on Debian GNU/Linux, and now forms the base from which new releases of Linspire are derived.

History



In August 2005, a distribution Live CD based on Linspire's source pools named Freespire hit the web by accident. This distribution was created by Andrew Betts and was not produced or released by Linspire Inc. Freespire was confused by some users to be an actual product from Linspire, and at the request of Linspire the distribution adopted a development codename Squiggle and began looking for a new name. Linspire then, on the back of the generated publicity, offered users a "free Linspire" (purchase price discounted to $0) by using the coupon code "Freespire" until September 9 2005, thereby greatly increasing its userbase.{{Fact|date=January 2007}} Squiggle OS is no longer in active development.

On April 24 2006, Linspire announced its own project named "Freespire". The new Freespire distribution was announced by Linspire President and CEO Kevin Carmony. This follows to the model of Fedora Core being supported by Red Hat and the community since 2003. Novell had also started a similar community project by the name of openSUSE for its SUSE Linux product line in the second half of 2005.

On July 14 2006, the first beta release of Freespire became available for download. (http://wiki.freespire.org/index.php/Download_Freespire)

On August 7, 2006, Freespire 1.0 was released three weeks ahead of schedule. (http://forum.freespire.org/showthread.php?t=723)

Eric S. Raymond, founder of the Open Source Initiative, joined Freespire Leadership Team on September 27 2006.

Features



Unlike Linspire version 5 and earlier, Freespire does not enable the root account by default. Instead, it gives sudo rights to all members of the admin group. However, some people claim that this is not a security improvement due to the fact that the admin user can become superuser without entering a password.

Future



Freespire 2.0 (which, as of December 15, 2006, is currently under development) is slated for release in 1st Quarter 2007. This will be the first version of Freespire to include the new open-source CNR client. (http://wiki.freespire.org/index.php/Freespire_Roadmap)
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