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Linspire/Freespire
Linspire is an Ubuntu-based distribution whose chief distiguishing feature is the ease of installing new software with its Click-N-Run (CNR) installation utility. While Linspire costs $50, its sibling Freespire is free.
Linspire, Inc., was founded in 2001 by Michael Robertson. It was originally called Lindows, to indicate to potential users that its software was a Windows-like version of Linux. The company and the distribution changed their name in 2004 to settle a trademark infringement lawsuit by Microsoft. In 2007 Linspire signed a licensing and patent agreement with Microsoft similar to the ones inked by Microsoft with Novell and Xandros.
Lindows version 1.0 was released in 2001. The current Linspire release is 6.0.
Freespire has the same relationship with Linspire as Fedora does with Red Hat, or openSUSE with SUSE. It's more community-oriented. Freespire is available in versions with and without closed source libraries. Version 1.0 was released in 2006. The current release is 2.0.
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