Published at LXer:

With the recent news of several Linux vendors entering into partnership agreements with Microsoft (Novell, Linspire, Xandros), there has been much debate recently about two factions of Linux forming. Saying that Linux is going to be torn in two, makes for good press and lively debates, but this is certainly nothing new for Linux.

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This piece is NOT gonna win Linspire any friends, and is probably going to generate more than a fair bit of outratge, particularly since it came from the CEO of Linspire.

The discussion is quite heated: http://forum.freespire.org/showthread.php?p=67167

So what did Carmony think the community would just sit by while him and other corporations stab FOSS developers in the back?

It's not about anit-MS sentiment it's about contaminating free(libre) software with proprietry, closed source, software/drivers/codecs/etc. What they (Linspire) are doing is not wrong, as in against the law, but what they are doing is eroding the free software work that has been built up.

If we sell out to the proprietry world, the way Linspire is doing here, we will never get our complete free software solution (OS, apps, drivers, firmware, codecs, and the rest) because there will not be as much incentive for software companies and hardware makers to develop free solutions, they will just tell you to use a distro with proprietry blobs. We need to stick to our guns as a group of consumers and demand free solutions.

Linspire is not taking the moral high ground as Carmony says, otherwise they would refuse any and all non-free software in their distro.

Well even though it hurts that GNU is not recognized for the work they have done I'm glad he called it "Linux" as opposed to "GNU/Linux", at least he didn't tarnish the fine name of GNU.