Today I was sent a video that Old Tech Bloke did on Freespire:
What are my thoughts? Not bad. I thought he gave Freespire a pretty good going over. There are a few things he did bring up that I do want to clarify and at least one point that he didn't bring up but was in the comments.
1. How did the acquisition of Bridgeways Linux properties come about? and being based on Ubuntu
Back in 2016 we were contacted by a friend of mine who worked for Bridgeways and was told they were leaving the IT industry. I was interested in their Linux properties specifically the old Corel Linux codebase and being a former user of Corel Linux, it had some unique properties to it that I wanted to see if we could utilize. As it turned out there really wasn't. All the new file-managers, Nautilus, Caja, and Thunar all pretty much filled that gap with easy networking and file management. We were actually thinking of dropping everything that we had with PC/OS and Black Lab Linux and go with OpenSUSE (Some of our beta testers still have the OpenSUSE build). But we decided to stick with Ubuntu. So yes, LIKE A LOT OF DISTRIBUTIONS out there we decided to base our releases on Ubuntu. Most distributions these days are based on other distributions and that's the beauty of the Linux world AND by extension the BSD world.
2. Is Freespire, Linspire and Xandros now a money grab?
He didn't bring this up but from some of the comments alluded to this and the answer is NO. Back in 2006 when we started making Linux distributions, we wanted something long term. What the LTS turned out to be. Before 2006 we actually started supporting Linux company wise in 2002, we were supporting Red Hat Linux and when Red Hat decided to go the RHEL route a lot of people were stuck with Fedora and Fedora had no support whatsoever. So, we were one of the few companies that supported Fedora for customers and offering the level of support these customers were used to getting from Red Hat before the switch over to pure RHEL. So, in 2006 we started making our own Linux distribution. We started out with Gentoo and while yes it was great and fun for us, we were hosting our own server to where people had to download and compile everything, we wanted something a lot easier that customers could just download and install while also being fast and simple. Ubuntu met our criteria. So, we started doing an Ubuntu based distribution. The first one that we released was in 2007 and as stated we wanted something long term. At the time Ubuntu releases were exactly 6 months apart. We have always worked in the desktop Linux space so making an argument to paying customers that you had to update every 6 months was a non-starter, so we were supporting Ubuntu's releases a lot longer than they were. So, when you purchase a support license from us, you are not buying Linux. You are paying for the support option for that software while we pay the licensing costs for some of the proprietary codecs and code that we include in the supported releases. We are an operating system company. We also do custom BSD builds for customers and we have been in business for over 20 years in the state of North Carolina. If people want to consider it a grift, it's probably the worst and longest grift in the history of grifts.
3. Our unique selling points and Google Integration
It's all about the base. We aim to offer a stable, long-term option for customers and users. We thoroughly test and prototype before we ship. When Canonical released 20.04, it was 2021 before we shipped the 20.04 LTS codebase in our products. The Google integration as well is a strong selling point for us. It is known that we see Chrome OS as our main competitor to our market. Education customers and enterprise customers make up a broad percentage of our customer base, over 80%, over 260 different school systems, education facilities, government and businesses. We started working on the web centric focus back in 2019 because our customers told us they like the idea of Chrome OS, but they also wanted the flexibility of installing traditional desktop applications. Crostini really wasn't a thing at the time we started, and our business customers wanted a native Linux environment for development and running inhouse apps. Crostini is container technology and it's not really that great right now. I myself have run into several issues with Crostini. Now he does say that anyone can take Xubuntu and do what we do and go with it. But that's the point. We do it so they don't have to. If people don't want to purchase the support options Linspire or Xandros OpenDesktop offers. If they don't need the support Freespire and Xandros CommunityDesktop are free to use, free to distribute and free to install on as many systems as they like.
4. Why Freespire, Linspire and Xandros?
When we first started shipping Linux distributions, I always said I wanted to have a free distribution for users. Something that was free to use, free to distribute and that users could put on as many machines that they liked. Why dont we ship the codecs with Freespire but kept the option to download them in Ubiquity? We wanted to stay as close to the FSF definition of free software as we could and make the distribution usable. But we also wanted to keep the option in there so if that's what users wanted, they could still get them. We believe it's the users' machine and they should be able to do with it what they want. With the supported release, Linspire, it does ship with all the multimedia codecs, Steam, Wine, multiple filesystem support i.e. XFS, JFS full ZFS and comes with 12 months of support. Xandros being an enterprise offering has more in terms of enterprise features and comes with 5 years of support and other support options. So, it's all about the users and what they want. We are a services-based company. We make distributions, Linux or BSD, for other people so we do what our customers tell us to do and what their needs are. We don't just make distributions for ourselves based on our own needs or wants. If that was the case, I would probably be still using Gentoo full time.
5. Basics and oversimplified
That is by design. I hate it when things get overly complex. Customers and users don't feel overwhelmed and everything's neat and tidy. If you have any ideas to where you think we could do better don't hesitate to write me or the support staff and we will consider it. Now this may sound a little bit like being an asshole but its not. The Linux community is not our target audience. We do have customers who are very active with the Linux community and we love them too. But our target audience is the consumer market. We will soon start shipping systems with Linspire and Xandros OpenDesktop preinstalled. We already do for certain customers. We want to introduce Linux to as many people as we can who may not have considered Linux as a viable desktop alternative before. Thats another reason why you see a very basic and simple touch to our marketing and to customer approach. We have been successful with that so far. Now if those users start to explore other options and want to experiment with other distributions that is perfectly fine.
So, to OldTechBloke, sorry man I don't know your real name, I want to personally thank you for the review. Much appreciated. The entire team has watched the video. Thank you very much. The high order bit is this. I love Linux. I have loved Linux since 1994 (UNIX since 1989) and even if PC/OpenSystems LLC went out of business tomorrow I'd still love Linux and would probably go work with a Linux company or start another one the day after.
Thanks everyone.
