The no-lawsuit agreement reached in June between Linspire and Microsoft earlier this year is almost useless to Linspire customers because of tight restrictions on what the deal covers, according to a high-profile open source legal commentator.

"Why call it «KompoZer» instead of «Nvu»? Because «Nvu and the Nvu logo are trademarks of Linspire Inc.» As Linspire stopped the development of Nvu, there is no legal way to correct any bug in Nvu.

Do you see what is happening here? Whether or not Linspire understands what is going on, Canonical is prepping to pick-up where Linspire left off. It will be a new means of software distribution, but bundled in a much more widely used distribution of Linux.

When Michael Robertson sold Linspire to Xandros, I doubt many people saw a lawsuit coming his way from former Linspire CEO Kevin Carmony.

According to multiple sources close to Linux distributor Linspire, former CEO Kevin Carmony was not the only executive to leave Linspire at the end of July.

Early reports yesterday alleged that Xandros had secretly purchased Linspire, an accusation later confirmed by Xandros executives. We now have fresh details on the deal, straight from the mouth of Andreas Typaldos, CEO of Xandros and freshly installed President of Linspire.

When I was CEO for Linspire, I started work on CNR.com. The goal for CNR.com was to become the central repository for all desktop Linux software for all of the most popular Linux distributions. I wanted to move heavily in this direction, because CNR was the one area where Linspire had a technological and branding advantage, and was also the one area where Linspire could actually make money.

After months of hard work, Linspire is proud to announce the beta release of CNR.com. On the 23rd of January, 2007, Linspire announced for the first time that they are working to extend their CNR (Click 'N Run) website for other popular Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE and Debian. The CNR service has already been available
for all Linspire and Freespire users. Kevin Carmony, the President and CEO of Linspire Inc., stated that he had enough with complaints from MS Windows and Mac users about Linux, and that there are too many distributions and each one has a different way of installing software: "When we started Linspire, we knew that we'd need to overcome this complexity. This led to Linspire's CNR ("Click 'N Run") technology."

After failing to get any response from Linspire as to why they are not holding annual shareholder meetings, I asked them publicly to do so in my last blog, in a hopes that pressure from customers, partners and shareholders would encourage them to do the right thing. I hold a fairly large amount of Linspire stock, but I remain in a minority position with about 100 other shareholders.