Linspire (formerly Lindows) is a commercial operating system based on Debian and Ubuntu and currently owned by PC/OpenSystems LLC.

On July 1, 2008, Linspire stockholders elected to change the company's name to Digital Cornerstone,[2] and all assets were acquired by Xandros.

[5] Based in San Diego, California, Lindows, Inc. was incorporated in July 2001 by Michael Robertson and began selling products in January 2002.

[6] Robertson's goal was to develop a Linux-based operating system capable of running major Microsoft Windows applications.

The company later abandoned this approach in favor of attempting to make Linux applications easy to download, install and use.

[17] This agreement was criticised, most notably by the Groklaw website[18] for being disingenuously short-lived and limited, and against the spirit of the GNU General Public License.

CNR had over 38,000 different software packages[citation needed], ranging from simple applications to major commercial works such as Win4Lin and StarOffice.

[20] CNR was originally subscription-based with two tiers: basic service cost $20 annually, and gold, featuring discounts on some commercial applications, $50.

[22] On January 23, 2007, Linspire announced that it intended to provide CNR for other Linux distributions, both APT- and RPM-based, including Debian, Fedora, OpenSUSE and Ubuntu.

[citation needed] On February 8, 2007, Linspire, Inc. announced a partnership with Canonical Ltd., publisher of the Ubuntu Linux distribution.

[27] Linspire, Inc. sponsored open source projects including the Pidgin and Kopete instant messaging clients, the Mozilla Firefox web browser,[citation needed] the ReiserFS file system, the Nvu WYSIWYG website editor, and the KDE-Apps.org and KDE-Look.org websites.

"[29] In addition, following the initial Freespire announcement Pamela Jones of the Groklaw website published an article entitled "Freespire: A Linux Distro For When You Couldn't Care Less About Freedom;" that was highly critical of Linspire, Inc., and the Freespire project, for including closed-source components and advertising them as a favourable point—an action she classed as ignoring free and open-source software (FOSS) community values in a "community-driven" distribution, asserting that "Free Software isn't about proprietary drivers" and that "proprietary codecs, drivers and applications are not Open Source or open in any way.