Technology news and Jobs 
Our Blogs Open Sauce Making hardware vendors love open source
Our Blogs Open Sauce Making hardware vendors love open source | Making hardware vendors love open source |
|
| by Sam Varghese | |
| Wednesday, 30 January 2008 | |
|
Page 2 of 3 Vendors could take a hit to their image due to venturing into open source; in this connection, he mentioned the recent case of the Asus eeePC which runs a Linux distribution. A story made the rounds of the web that Asus was violating the GPL, something the company had done unintentionally. But the news spread and Asus' image suffered as a result. Featured Whitepaper
5 Best Practices for Smartphone Support
Hohndel also pointed out that at times the process of reverse-engineering was fraught with danger. He cited the case of the Matrox Millennium graphics card from about a dozen years ago where the reverse-engineered driver ended up frying the card. The vendor had to come to the rescue and provide the necessary documentation to limit the damage. Preventing damage was one thing to which companies gave a lot of thought and one reason why they were willing to go the open source route. Hohndel was blunt about the real reason: "The main reason for going open source is to make a buck," he said, adding "even the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child project) is in this to make money." To underline his point, he said only money talked - one had to translate the "we want" (what the consumers want) into "they want" (what the companies want). One way to increase the pressure on vendors for open source drivers was to make a bid to increase the marketshare of Linux. "As Linux has 25 to 28 per cent marketshare in the server space, talking to hardware people is somewhat useful," he said, "but on the desktop Linux has only 0.8 per cent. And even if the eeePC sells as many millions as it is projected to during this year, the marketshare of Linux will only double." He said consumers must signal that they did not want Windows on their PCs and the message must be loud enough - say, by getting a group together and making a request for PCs with Linux or else PCs with no operating system. Such statistics, of groups making such requests, were more important than commonly realised; when cited by marketing people, they often influenced decisions made by companies. |
| < Next story in category | Previous story in the category > |
|---|
