i thought linux was based on free open source..untill i found linspire..do you guys REALLY pay for it?

yes. nothing ever says you can't charge for your work, and as much as i think linspire sucks as a product, i have nothing against anyone selling their end result. you don't like it? well try one of the other 10,000 versions of linux out there. and read the GPL properly.

i am using lispire 5.0.347 on 3 systems at home at the moment
and it saves a lot of head banging

everything just works and it is worth every penny/cent ...

i have used
RH 7, 8, 9
fedora 1, 2, 3
xandros V1
suse 10
ubuntu warty, hoary, breezy
kubuntu hoary, breezy
now im on linspire and loving it ...

The GPL specifically allows for selling it (what do you think charging for distribution is?)

I pay for SuSE Linux even though it's perfectly legal to copy it. Why? Because it is an excellent distribution and I buy it after downloading and testing a release, because the retail sales help to support the distribution's continued existence.

Linspire also offers additional functionality for paying customers, such as their really slick package management and an environment which Windows users will find very, very easy to use, even when compared to uber-friendly distributions such as Mandriva and SuSE.

*hugs*

I don't use Suse but I like your thinking and wish more people were willing to pay instead of pirating stuff like Cedega cause they figure linux and everything on it should be free.

personally i don't like that thinking... i'd rather my money went to the little guys that do the hard work, not the distro vendor. But then that's just another way to make the money flow.

It is open-source. That means you can just take the source code and re-compile it yourself (for free), like SquiggleOS is a free rebuild of Linspire. Similarly, CentOS is a free rebuild of the paid RedHat Enterprise. The only difference is the support, which is the reason people pay for these distros anyway.

so far so good
i have installed linspire to all the systems that i have (3)
the wife and kids find it very easy to install/uninstall software via CnR

if this fails then i will reinstall 9x (a route i don't wish to go )

all the family must be able to use linux or linux fails
and the other alternative will be the only other option
wish me luck if you can but this is my last shot at linux ...

Well as for Linspire, they also give back to the community. For example they return the modified sourcecode to the developers (as the GPL states) but they also give financial support (KDE-Look, gAIM, WINE but that has stopped after they abandonned the idea to run windows software on Linux, and more recently K3B to name just a few.)
I don't know about other distro's but with Linspire the money you pay for it (or a part of it since Linspire is a company and they need money to survive) flows back to the Linux community.

Actually Linspire is not 100% GPL'd software, you can ask the developer of Squiggleos. Some things like their CNR warehouse software is closed and they also contain some licensed proprietary codecs (like Windows media codecs) so you can't recompile Linspire completely, BUT you are correct in a way since you can download their sourcecode (this doesn't contain the proprietary stuff like CNR) and recompile that into your own free distro, that's one of the best parts of Linux).

Although it's not my favorite distro, I have nothing against people trying to make money and it is a good thing that wealthy people get involved in the linux business. Linspire is great when you first start and you cna always add your own software via apt-get.

It is clean, stable and polished. Not a bad thing.

If you want to compete with windows, it needs to be all of the above. Historically though, every time i messed around with apt-get, I ended up breaking linspire. Not so in 5.0

Well even though I'm a Moderator at the Linspire forums I don't use Linspire myself (running plain Debian GNU/Linux Sarge and SID (depending on the system)). so I can't say for Five-O since I don't use it. but my experience with Linspire (from LindowsOS 2.x pre-release until Linspire 4.5). is that APT breaks Linspire (depending on what you install since there are a lot of programs that don't break it).
There is a post on the forums from a user that installing Digikam with APT breaks Linspire (I never tried it myself though).

But basically my feeling is that Linspire is a very good distro for people who are new to Linux, windows converts or new computer users but if you want to use other installation methods then CNR you are better off with a distro like plain Debian but that's just IMHO.

you could always use apt-pinning for the Linspire file system that way apt will not break the system
it worked for me very well when using Xandros ...