They're fallin' like dominoes: Linspire makes a deal with Microsoft

I don't think they are fallin like dominoes. Anyone paying attention will notice that the companies that are jumping on this are companies that are not really Linux friendly anyway. Most people in the community never liked Linspire or Xandros to be honest. And even though the community liked Suse and most people felt that Novell at one point was a really innovative company. We all know that Novell has always been a proprietary software company.

The interesting thing I am trying to figure out is how you can provide patent protection to a company like Linspire who does not own any of the code they are using? They are not owners of Linux or any code in Linux or in the GNU parts that make up a distro.

As a matter of fact, Linspire is now based on Ubuntu so it's not even a Distro. Its a distro that is Based on Ubuntu which is based on Debian. ???

How will that hold up in court when none of the companies have ownership rights to any of the code they sell or ship? How will those patent agreements not also apply to the actual owners of the code?

The patent protection is a sham, MS aim to make people _believe_ Linux infringes patents. They know some of their patents won't stand up in court and fear any reprisals from patent trolls. Hence, fighting free software in the legal system isn't going to fly. For the charade to continue, they have to create news events where Linux distrubitors give MS' patents a nod as if to say "yes, we think those patents would all stand up in court".

All that patent stuff is hard to figure out because there is simply no reality to it. It is brought up as a distraction which allows the cuckoo to lay her egg (or attempts to). MS' eggs are of course their 'experience enhancing licensed technologies'.

If Lindows had merely licensed those bits mentioned (fonts, speech codecs, wmv) they probably still would've gotten some stick from the community it would've been ok. However, now that they've played along they have given credence to the idea that those ~235 patents are a threat that need to be dealt with. There is a way to deal with a community, this isn't it. From MS you can't really expect much better but Lindows have definitely bit the hand that feeds them.

Oh, and btw, if you want some fully licensed MS ttf fonts you can always 'apt-get install msttcorefonts', no need for siging some ridiculous patent covenant with the boys and girls in Redmond.

Just how pervasive is Linspire's Click N Run anyway? Besides the original Linspire/Freespire's CNR and the CNR in Ubuntu, just what other distros has CNR really penetrated???

Besides the attempt by Ubuntu to uncouple CNR out of its package list, perhaps the best course of avoiding Linspire's falling domino is to use either native package management systems or package management systems clearly other than CNR.

Look CNR is a pretty good technology, it's not perfect, but it's good. It's not that Synaptic ot drakconf can't do what CNR does, and I can see that Mandriva are duplicating the best parts of CNR in Drakconf, so there is nothing about it that can't be done fairly easily.

One of the things that CNR doesn't do is something I would like to see done is a greater seperation of the libraries from the applications, I'm still seeing far too often that applications i don't want getting installed because the package contains libraries that are need elsewhere.

Could some one who used CNR and Synaptic tell us how they are different or better?

Would be nice.

CNR attempts to bring the various applications packages together in and application centric, rather than a package centric manner, I know this is sometimes a subtle distinction. You don't need to know that GIMP is an image editing tool, you need only know that you want to edit images. You don't need to know that Totem is a Movie player, only that you want to play movies.

But the CNR is more than just about managing packages in an application centric manner. It also enables you to set up multiple machines with the same desktop and the same applications. The data is stored remotely, so in practise, and I've done it you can set up a machine in Kickatinalong (nice town) and then pop on ever to Woopwoop (another nice town) and set up another machine for someone else using your CNR account to synchronise the two machines' application set. very useful in a business that's distributed across the state or country or the world

The CNR also offers user ratings on the various applications, so that a new user can get an Idea of what applications are popular.

Synaptic, like apt, and drakconf and smart are package centric, and they don't have a number of the extras that CNR has. There is no reason, other than developer priority, why they can't be. In fact Mandriva seems to be developing drakconf into a CNR like package manager.

Quoting:tracyanne, bring the various applications packages together in and application centric, rather than a package centric manner

- Thanks for the info.

That is very helpful, and I believe Synaptic can be easily made to do that since it has a brief and full description of every package it has. Any discro that have their own deployment server can do that by changing the short description to a meaningful name plus a short description. The difficulty is finding good names that consistent across distros for the shear number of applications.

The rest I am not impressed with. Synaptic can do the user friendly install quite easily.

For remote desktops in corporate environment, you can use Debian Package Manager dpkg (command line), which I consider to be a lot more practical and efficient.

I believe with CNR, you would need to do certain configuration and setup to work properly. You make it sound to be so easy which I don't believe it is. Is it?

I really not that impressed by CNR.

Quoting:You make it sound to be so easy which I don't believe it is. Is it?

You may have to take my word for it. It actually is, especially if you are a Linux newbie.

but

Quoting:I really not that impressed by CNR.

Nor am I, not enough to want to use Linspire or even Freespire, both of which I believe to be broken. That's why I stopped using Linspire in 2006, and went back to Mandriva with 2006 Powerpack, and only ever ran Freespire on my test machine. In my opinion Mandriva's Powerpack is the best commercial value add available, and they are doing it without resorting to what appear to me to be shady patent deals with Microsoft.

In addition I think drakconf, which was my first introduction to easy package management, back in 2000 - 2001, is a really good packagemanager, and the changes Mandriva are making to it will make it better than CNR.