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Red Hat Develops Online Desktop

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the hope-your-isp-is-reliable dept.

pete314 writes "Red Hat announced this week at their San Diego Red Hat Summit that they are planning to compete with Microsoft on the desktop by building an 'online desktop' that will integrate local data with online services. Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens argued that: 'To user the desktop metaphor is dead. We don't believe that recreating a Windows paradigm in an open source model will do anything to advance the productivity in the life of users.'"

5 of 119 comments (clear)

  1. Competing with Microsoft? by Otter · · Score: 4, Insightful
    "To user the desktop metaphor is dead. We don't believe that recreating a Windows paradigm in an open source model will do anything to advance the productivity in the life of users," Stevens added.

    And therefore they're reimplementing the Windows 98 Active Desktop...?

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    What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
    1. Re:Competing with Microsoft? by Bogtha · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Maybe the Windows 98 Active Desktop has a chance of being successful now that always-on Internet connections are vastly more common. There was another technology built into Internet Explorer 4.0 that also died from lack of use. It was called "channels", and was very similar to RSS. Yet today, RSS and Atom are wildly popular. Sometimes the technology doesn't need to change if the world does.

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      Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
  2. What about when you are offline? by deragon · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Often I use my laptop in the subway. Guess what? No internet access. So how would I perform my work with such a paradigm? What about when you go to your country house, in the woods? To user the desktop metaphor is not dead when offline.

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    Remember the year 2000? They promised us flying cars. They delivered the PT Cruiser...
  3. Re:Lemme boot the terminal by korekrash · · Score: 4, Insightful

    At about 50 cents a gig, I'll stick to speed and security rather than trying to save 500 megs of drive space.

  4. Online services == less freedom by Wesley+Felter · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Storing your own data locally on your own computer and manipulating it with local apps may be "old thinking", but at least it puts you in control. Just when a critical mass of free (as in freedom) software is emerging, Red Hat is talking about services. I suspect it's impossible to make these services free as in freedom.