The demise of cnr?

[Husse]

Found this on Distrowatch

Kevin Carmony, a controversial former CEO of Linspire who recently switched his allegiance to Ubuntu, has written an interesting blog entry on the current state of CNR.com, Linspire's flagship software distribution service. Since Linspire has not made enough effort to maintain a good working relationship with Ubuntu, he argues that CNR.com (and, by extension, possibly even Linspire and Freespire), is likely to fail: "Unfortunately, since leaving Linspire, it appears the Ubuntu relationship is on the rocks. I know since I switched to Ubuntu, I haven't even bothered trying CNR.com. The built-in software management system Ubuntu has is a better experience, and all they need to do is add a commercial piece (easy enough for them to do), and they'd have little use for CNR.com. It would appear Linspire has figured this out as well and sees the writing on the wall, and that without Ubuntu, CNR.com will fail."

Link
http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20080218#news

[MagnusB]

CNR has never really been a great solution for default software management, Synaptic/APT is much better. The strong side of CNR.com is that you get commercial software, if you have a paid account you get discount on commercial software. I hope CNR stays, but free/linspire should add Synaptic and the Ubuntu repos default on their installation, gives the user the freedom of choice: CNR for commercial, Synaptic for open!

[foggytown]

Plus Ubuntu has been adding commercial software to its repos, Parallels comes to mind.

I remember really liking CNR back when Linspire was still Lindows. Of course, I've learned a lot since then.

[MagnusB]

I remember when this Bill Gates wannabe came into the linux world
I remember me and a host of others on linuxquestions were taking bets on how long cnr and linspire would last, sad to say he and cnr lasted longer than any of us thought

I don't think Linspire is all that bad, in fact, all the publicity they got from the Lindows stuff were equally publicity for Linux. Also, CNR is not that bad of an idea, it is a great way to offer customers commercial software, they also offer great discounts, but as a software management tool it sucks, APT is way better.. And they have some great stuff on their wiki and documentation, one of the best is the a "chart" showing support for file types/codecs (AVI, DOC, XLS, etc..)

[foggytown]

I don't think Linspire is all that bad,

I agree.

My understanding is that they are closing down the old CNR and replacing it with the new and improved community driven one.

To me Carmony's statements just sound like sour grapes from a former employee. It seems that now that Ubuntu is putting commercial software in their repos that they are seeing CNR as competition (CNR supports the two most recent Ubuntu releases). I would think there would be room for both...

See http://media.linspire.com/mailers/Warehousemessage.html

--john