CNR for Ubuntu (and many other distros) could be huge for Linux

I've been meaning to blog about this for a while but kept getting side tracked by other distractions. And judging by the frequency of my posts, I seem to have a lot :)

As most Ubuntu users have heard, Ubuntu and Linspire announced some sort of technology pact. Linspire would base their distro on (K)Ubuntu and then Linspire would make CNR (Click and Run) available to Ubuntu users. According to the new multi-distro CNR site, this service will be launching vaguely in the 2nd quarter of 2007.

Personally, I am pretty excited about what this could mean for Linux in general. Why? A common reason that commercial desktop software is not created for Linux is that the Linux desktop market share is too small. Fair enough, businesses should put their money where it makes most sense. But even if a company decides to pursue the Linux market they are faced with the decision of choosing one or more distros to support. I imagine this is quite daunting and presents another obstacle to releasing software for Linux. CNR has the potential to solve this problem and could become the single Linux "platform" a commercial software application would need to support.

The above statement is probably not 100% true, but perhaps true enough to make it easier for a company to support may Linux distros at once. If Linspire plays their cards right, CNR could become an expert in packaging software for all the various distros and become a very important link in the software delivery chain. Not only would they be important to the company distributing the software, but also to users as CNR could offer some assurance that software in CNR is malware and spyware free.

If you compare this to the typical Windows method of downloading and installing software from random websites, it would seem that CNR is not only improving the ease of installation on Linux but actually surpassing the experience that most Windows users have. And by actually making the experience of using a computer better than it currently is, people will have a reason to try and switch to Linux.