Linspire nears million-user mark

Linspire claims to have significantly increased its user base since the launch of version five of its Linux desktop product.

Kevin Carmony, the chief executive of Linspire, told ZDNet UK on Tuesday that there has been considerable demand for Linspire 5, also known as Five-0.

"Prior to Five-0 we had a lot of interest, but not that many users," said Carmony. "We're now approaching a million users. That's a significant number for Linspire and I'm pretty confident that it's the largest user base for any Linux desktop distro."

At the UK launch of Linspire 5 back in April, Michael Robertson, the company's former chief executive, said that there were only 350,000 Linspire users worldwide.

The company is now focusing on the business market and plans to release a new version of its product aimed at the enterprise market in the next few months. This product will offer improved desktop management, such a feature to make it easier for administrators to lock down user desktops.

Linspire initially targeted the consumer market as it was easier to tackle. "We started with the consumer market as we knew we could get to two or three million users before we got to the first fifty thousand business users," said Carmony. But, the business market has woken up to Linux "a little sooner than expected", according to Carmony.

He claimed that Linspire is working with a number of companies, including a company with hundreds of thousands of desktops, which is "definitely migrating to Linux" in some of its departments. The company, which is unwilling to be named to avoid media interest, has carried out a beta test involving 8,000 desktops, according to Carmony.

Linspire has already had some success in the public sector, with 35 schools in Indiana trialling Linux on the desktop. This trial could lead to the deployment of 300,000 Linux PCs in the state over coming years.

Last month, Linspire hit the news when it gave away free copies of Linspire 5, following confusion over a similarly named product that was being given away free. Freespire, which is a version of Linspire without the proprietary sections, has now changed its name to Squiggle.

Carmony said that 60,000 people downloaded Linspire during the week it was made available free, but was not worried about the potential loss of revenue.

"I don't care how many people download it or buy it in a box — I only care about it being pre-installed on computers. We only get a few dollars profit anyway when we sell it in a box," he said.