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Red Hat Avoids Desktop Linux, Says Too Tough
eldavojohn writes "We recently discussed the Linux Foundation's decision to leave desktop Linux alone but Red Hat is also steering clear of that goal. The reason? It's too tough. From the company blog: 'It's worth pointing out what's missing in the list above: we have no plans to create a traditional desktop product for the consumer market in the foreseeable future. An explanation: as a public, for-profit company, Red Hat must create products and technologies with an eye on the bottom line, and with desktops this is much harder to do than with servers.'"
The title the post is in accurate. They are avoiding the "consumer" desktop not desktops altogether. Per the article they are still committed to developing desktops for the corporate market. This is a logical move as corporate environments tends to be a much more controlled (more current hardware and managed upgrade schedules anyone) and profitable to support than the wild west of consumer desktops and clueless users . . .
Hopefully the moderators will correct this very missleading title.
As usual, the /. headline is misleading. TFA more-or-less says that they have no plans to produce a consumer desktop product because they don't see it as a money maker. This basically means that they don't plan on having a boxed desktop product that you can buy at the store like Mandriva. Fedora will continue on as is - something they work on with the community but don't sell.
* Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop. This is our fully supported, commercial product. It is 100 percent compatible with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux server products. Its focus is to provide a desktop environment that is secure and easily managed. And it is upgradeable with the Multi-OS option (which provides virtualization support) or the Workstation option (which provides high-end workstation capabilities).
* Fedora. This is a Red Hat sponsored, fast-growing, free product. While Red Hat doesn't formally support Fedora, users can turn to a healthy online community to obtain help when they need it.
* Red Hat Global Desktop (RHGD). Plans for this product were originally announced at the 2007 Summit Conference. It is designed exclusively for small, reseller supplied, deployments in emerging markets (e.g. primarily the BRIC countries), and will be supplied by a number of Intel channel partners.
We originally hoped to deliver RHGD within a few months, and indeed the technology side of the product is complete. There have, however, been a number of business issues that have conspired to delay the product for almost a year. These include hardware and market changes, startup delays with resellers, getting the design and delivery of appropriate services nailed down and, unsurprisingly, some multimedia codec licensing knotholes. Right now we are still working our way through these issues. As mentioned earlier, the desktop business model is tough, so we want to be prepared before delivering a product to the emerging markets. This means that, as you probably expected, Red Hat is focusing their for-sale desktop on the enterprise market, and letting the consumer market use the free, unsupported Fedora for now. The "tough" comment was about a new low-cost consumer offering outside the U.S.
The headline should be: "Red Hat Delays Low-Cost Consumer Desktop, Says Business Model Is Tough".
Well, M$ is not an illegal monopoly, they are a confirmed monopoly which has been convicted of illegal behavior.
A semantic issue, for sure.
There is nothing inherently illegal with their monopoly, but many of their actions which created a barrier to entry into the market as well as blatantly killing off emerging technologies by leveraging their monopoly in other areas are what is abusive and illegal. It's what they got "busted" for, if you can call what the DoJ did to them "busting".
The Bush era DoJ should have had the cajones to split them up as per the judges decree, but I suspect too many people in the Bush administration have too much cash tied up in M$ to do that.
Pooty tweet