Linspire's Carmony on the Ubuntuforums: Click'n'StandYourGroundAndFight
It's not often the CEO of a software company wades into what might be a hostile forum to defend his company's actions.
The GNU/Linux community doesn't like Linspire (formerly Lindows, seldomly, Lin--- (say, LIN-dash) ) very much. The criticisms are wide-ranging, but a great deal of the friction comes from the idea that Linspire, through its ClickNRun (CNR)service, is attempting to commodify Free Software in a distasteful way.
Of course, we know from a famous GNU.org fatwa that selling Free Software is not a sin; but for the community, which exsits constantly wired to the Internet, the idea of actually buying software that can be obtained by other means is pointless. In Linspire's defense, most people are not that connected, and still think of software as something that you get in a shrink-wrapped box, with a manual and a tech support line. To that end, Linspire produced OOOoFf [page from archive.org], a CD that included OpenOffice.org's Office Suite and the Mozilla Firefox browser.
This was met by howls of protest and derision, which occasioned CEO Kevin Carmony's foray into the Ubuntuforums.
KC has proposed Opening CNR to Ubuntu users--thus giving Ubuntu users easy access--for a price!-- to a number of things that are not available in the standard repositories, like legal multimedia codecs and commercial software (possibly including games?).
I've got to give KC some big props for coming into the ubuntuforums and fighting his corner. I may disagree with how his distribution works, and may not be willing to pay money for it, but he's a brave soul to come right out and trade posts with the ubunteros.
If his CNR-for-Ubuntu plan works, Linspire will have cleverly become the dominant vendor for proprietary and commercial software on the Debian-daughter Distros like Ubuntu. It's quite a strategy for corporate survival, since the Linspire distribution does not seem to be doing quite as well in the marketplace.
EDIT 0032 3 Mar: ubuntuforums threads were merged, link updated to reflect merged threads.