A short while ago, Linspire announced the creation of the Freespire project, a free, community-driven distribution based on their commercial Linspire product. I’ve been mulling over this move for a while, and why I think that, ultimately, it’s going to struggle.
In his interview with LugRadio, Kevin Carmony, CEO of Linspire, said that having a community-based distribution that was easily available was important so that techies in companies could see it, know it, and ultimately be able to endorse the commercial product should it become a viable option in their company. And I think there is one major problem with this assertation: Linspire is, as Kevin himself said in a previous interview, the AOL of Linux distributions. Thing is, business don’t use AOL. Perhaps a better distinction is that Linspire is the XP Home to the XP Pro of other Linux distributions. Companies aren’t going to run it on their desktops, and thus I think that Freespire is not going to help this at all.
I’m not sure what incentive there is for existing Linux people to get involved in Freespire. With the Fedora project (probably the closest example we have of something similar) succeeded in part because Red Hat completely withdrew their desktop product for a while, and Fedora was ‘the’ Red Hat desktop for a while. Ubuntu has succeeded because they’ve managed to make an extremely usable, Debian-based, desktop distro, without being overly ‘offensive’ to the advanced, technical users.
I’m also unclear as to whether there is any incentive for existing users to offer Linspire as a distribution to their friends/family. Generally, I find that most people install and setup $favourite_distro for people, as it is easier for them to provide support on a distro they know and understand. But I’m not convinced that Linspire will ever be the distro of choice for this kind of person.
Probably the biggest advantage of Freespire/Linspire is the available of proprietary codecs, and other pay-for software (that you still have to pay for) via Click ‘N’ Run. But such things are available easily enough on desktop distros, and this kind of installation is only going to get easier.
I would be interested to hear others’ thoughts – especially Jono, given that he’s on the Freespire board 
mrBen