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.

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.

A quick update on Linspire and Xandros, which signed patent deals with Microsoft.

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.

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

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.

I hear the former CEO of Linspire said it’s going to ruin the company, because the shares will become worthless. While I’m no expert on shares etc. and since I’ve never been a CEO, the guy’s probably right about this. But for us users, what we’re going to see, is a new direction for the not-so-popular Click ‘n’ Run and maybe even a new, merged distribution?

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."

"Being easy to install and easy to use is not enough. The first lesson of "open source business" is that your first debt is to your user and developer communities, from which everything else grows".

The biggest problem for Xandros and Linspire has been the "patent covenants" that both companies signed with Microsoft.