tombh wrote:@richard.a: Gosh, I never knew Microsoft was so involved in Linspire! Did you use to help make Linspire or do you just mean you used it for a while?
Words like "legacy" and "necessary hardware upgrades" send chills down my spine as a result of what just happened, so please take my caution very, very, seriously, if you don't want to frighten users away who got burned by Mr. Gates first, and by Mr. Robertson second.
Not that I know much about CNR but I get the impression that it is a much more encompassing solution than what I was suggesting. I certainly don't think that the connection between the server and the client code should be anything more than to communicate URLs and metadata. At the least one should be able to use the web interface to search, browse and download packages -- a client app that can do this
and install the package for you should be a bonus not a necessity.
Maybe a few historical notes would be handy because perhaps what I wrote is a bit unintelligible
I apologise about that.
In 2001 the entrepreneur who created mp3.com, a businessman with a flair for technology (Michael Robertson) set up a company to create a commercial Linux distribution that he hoped would eventually compete with Microsoft on its home turf - the home user. He called the company
Lindows Inc. One suspects that the name was a deliberate choice, to "goad the bull" so to speak.
Initially the idea was to develop a commercial form of
WINE and run actual Windows applications where people wanted to. And the
Click-n-Run Warehouse was an early idea, to implement similar installation features as found in Windows apps, in his Linux (initially, being sold on to other Linuxes eventually).
The WINE concept didn't work how MR would have liked, although he did financially support wineHQ quite well.
I never saw Version 1, and I don't think anyone outside San Diego did either. I have a copy of Version 2 which came on one CD and yes, it works.
Version 3 was a lot better, and then came Version 4 in 2004 from memory and the CNR system was working well with 4.0 which was a public release. Then Mr Gates started to take notice, perhaps because of the good press Mr. Robertson was having. Or maybe a premonition that Redmond wasn't going to do as well next year.
Remember
Redmond Linux that became
Lycoris and eventually there was one guy, no sales, and Mandrake/Mandriva bought the name, the website and the code? I have a copy of the final release which was very smooth, but slower than Lindows, and that's saying something.
I purchased ver 2, 3 and 4 of Lindows by mail because I was on dialup until 2003.
Mr Gates responded by surprising everybody over how many courts in how many countries he issued writs against Mr Robertson, Lindows Inc, and Lindows.com. MS's attorneys actually bamboozled a judge in Holland to state that if anyone in the Netherlands logged onto Lindows.com, Mr Robertson would be responsible to the tune of many $$US for each such act. Interesting how judges can make uneducated rulings which are binding. My copy of the final judgement is at
http://linspire.homelinux.org/court/AMSDAM-finalruling.pdf
Thousands of dollars were raised by public subscription and I'm one of those "Lifetime Insiders" which gave me lifetime access to the CNR as well. Until a few weeks ago, that is, when the power to the server was turned off.
My involvement was as a brand-new broadband user in 2003 with 4.5 having just been released, downloading ISOs sometimes twice a week, to check how prospective changes would work, in many ways a beta tester, through ver 4.5 and then to 5-O as it was called (think Hawaii 5-O).
Peter van der Linden did the background hack work for his book "
Guide to Linux" during this time, and a number of us get a mention in his preface, which was very nice of him. I also proof-read one of his chapters but never got my comments back in time because of family sickness.
During the time of the court cases, there was a tremendous sense of camaraderie among the insiders. This lasted through to the post 5.0 release period. Somewhere I have a Lindows sweatshirt saying "I was there 2002-2003-2004" on the back
Name was changed to Linspire as part of the deal with Microsoft, who we were told would own the "Lindows" name, and an initial undisclosed amount was paid to Lindows (corporate) from memory although later a huge figure was quoted across the technical press spectrum.
So that is the extent of my involvement with them. I saved the choicepc.com website (which is no longer online) but my copy is at
http://micro-hard.homelinux.net/ChoicePC.com/index.htm and the
Lin---s.com website they put up to defy the (unworkable) Dutch judge's directive. My copy is at
http://linspire.homelinux.org/downloads/lin---s.com/index.htm
My saved ChoicePC site has a number of the pages for which there were links on the front page; if you wish to look at them, go up one level which is a directory listing, and pick through the pages.
I believe the court action result may have contributed to the success of subsequent EU court rulings about MS being in breach of this and that (restrictive practice) with Media Player and Internet Explorer.
So there we go. The involvement of Microsoft was purely antagonistic, the way I saw it.
Sorry about deviating from the topic
Richard