Many people have asked us; What are the differences between Linspire and Black Lab Enterprise? Why market both? and which one should I use?
When we looked at our market, customer and user base we found there are different segments of people that use our products. So with that we have split up these distributions to support different segments.
Freespire, Freespire is a 100% free distribution. There is no monetizing of Freespire we dont make any money or revenue from Freespire. The main audience for Freespire is the Linux community and other users who want a free OS.
Linspire, this version is our completely commercial release. We sell Linspire and we sell systems with Linspire. Linspire is aimed at the consumer, education and corporate desktop market.
Now, with Black Lab Enterprise that is aimed at a totally different sector of the market. Black Lab Enterprise Linux shares a lot of resources with Linspire and Freespire but it is managed in a different way. No one on the Black Lab Linux team works on Linspire and Freespire. The Black Lab team is run by a governing board for which elections are held every 24 months.Black Lab Linux is aimed at the more technical market. Users migrating from Unix to Linux, parallel computing, power users and users who need more computing power and less desktop oriented operations.
Updating
The update process for Linspire and Freespire are a lot different than they are for Black Lab Enterprise Linux.
Linspire and Freespire are desktop oriented OS's aimed at the desktop market and Freespire will get incremental updates as needed with new releases coming out every 6 months. Linspire being a commercial distribution will have incremental updates as needed and major releases every 12 to 18 months similar to other Enterprise distributions from Red Hat and Micro Focus.
Black Lab Enterprise Linux being needed for much longer periods of time and being used for workloads that cant be taken offline every 6 months will have incremental updates as needed with security fixes and app fixes with major release updates coming ever 24 months.
Availability
Freespire is available for download, free of charge
http://distro.ibiblio.org/blacklab/freespire/freespire-3-x64.iso
http://distro.ibiblio.org/blacklab/freespire/freespire-3-x64.iso.md5
http://distro.ibiblio.org/blacklab/freespire/freespire-3-x64.iso.sha256
Linspire is available for purchase either as a digital download or as a boxed set from
http://www.linspirelinux.com
Black Lab Enterprise Linux is available as a free download both in the desktop and server form, but its also available for purchase from the website.
http://www.blacklablinux.org
Black Lab Enterprise Desktop
http://distro.ibiblio.org/blacklab/releases/115/bled-1152-x64.iso
http://distro.ibiblio.org/blacklab/releases/115/bled-1152-x64.iso.md5
http://distro.ibiblio.org/blacklab/releases/115/bled-1152-x64.iso.sha256
Black Lab Enterprise Server
http://distro.ibiblio.org/blacklab/releases/115/blel-1151-x64.iso
http://distro.ibiblio.org/blacklab/releases/115/blel-1151-x64.iso.md5
http://distro.ibiblio.org/blacklab/releases/115/blel-1151-x64.iso.sha256
