Freespire's Google ads: "What is Ubuntu Missing?"

[Alexander Jacob Tsykin]

On Tuesday 03 October 2006 20:47, Paul Sladen wrote:
> On Tue, 3 Oct 2006, Alexander Jacob Tsykin wrote:
> > > Whatever distribution or window-manager a machine is running, that's
> > > still one more Free [GNU/Linux] desktop in the wild than there was
> > > before. People should be applauded for that.
> >
> > Except that it is not a free desktop if it comes with proprietary
> > software installed, like proprietary multimedia codecs
>
> Sure, and by the time you've manually installed the 'w32codecs', or
> 'nvidia-glx' on Ubuntu then---that's in the same league.
>
> Freespire could be a halfway step in the right-direction.

I merely observed that you cannot really call this a free desktop, not that it 
is a bad thing. I happen to disagree with it, because I prefer software to be 
free, and so I prefer, in principle, the slight extra difficulty of 
installing any proprietary software I might use, which si very little and 
does not include w32codecs and nvidia-glx, but the fact remains that what you 
are describing is not, and cannot be said to be, a free desktop, in the free 
and open source software sense.

Sasha