Freespire
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A screenshot of Freespire 2.0.8
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| Developer | Linspire, Inc. and the Freespire community |
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| OS family | Unix-like |
| Working state | Discontinued |
| Source model | Open source (with optional proprietary components) |
| Latest release | 2.0.8 / November 30, 2007 |
| Available in | English |
| Platforms | x86 |
| Kernel type | Monolithic kernel |
| Default user interface | KDE |
| License | Free software licenses (mostly GPL) with optional proprietary-licensed components |
| Official website | (Final Internet Archive) |
Freespire was a community-driven Linux distribution which was composed mostly of free, open source software, while providing users the choice of including proprietary software including multimedia codecs, device drivers and application software.
Freespire was originally derived from Linspire. Freespire 1.0 was based on Debian, while Freespire 2.0 was based on Ubuntu. Linspire was bought by Xandros, who originally planned to switch back to Debian for future Freespire releases.
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. 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 then Linspire President and former CEO Kevin Carmony. This follows to the model of Fedora 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.
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