Freespire is a community-driven Linux distribution which is 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 is originally derived from Linspire. Freespire 1.0 is based on Debian, while Freespire 2.0 is based on Ubuntu. Linspire was bought by Xandros, who decided to switch back to Debian for future Freespire releases.
History
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.
Xandros acquired Linspire/Freespire in the Summer of 2008. Xandros plans on keeping Freespire as a community developed distribution similar to that of OpenSUSE and Fedora for their respective commercial distributions.
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