Dell, Linux... and Mark Shuttleworth

Sam Varghese
Monday, 19 March 2007 08:31

Opinion and Analysis

A few weeks back Dell invited ideas from the world at large about what it should put on sale - in other words, what did the so-called "community" want?

 It turned out that the "community" wanted PCs installed with GNU/Linux. As of today, 113,556 individuals have said Dell should offer the top three distributions out of the showroom; another 78,300 want OpenOffice.org installed as an alternative to Microsoft Works or Microsoft Office. They've all registered and logged in to make these demands - so they have expended some time on it.

The next step obviously would be for Dell to react and start taking steps to meet this demand. But the company has done nothing. Instead it has issued a response that carefully skirted the issues and ended up pleasing nobody.

I wrote about Dell's fan dance earlier this month and wasn't planning to follow it up. But now, we have a staunch defence of Dell's position by Mark Shuttleworth, the proprietor of Canonical which owns the Ubuntu GNU/Linux project.

Some of his assertions as to why it is difficult to buy a PC with GNU/Linux installed (and not pre-installed which would mean installed before being installed, a ludicrous suggestion and as gross an abuse of the English language as I have ever seen) strike me as rather questionable.

For instance, he starts out by asserting that margins on PCs are razor-thin. No figures are provided to back up this assertion. If PC makers are struggling to make a buck, if they show small profits every year and someone makes such an assertion, I would be inclined to take it seriously. But that isn't the case; PC makers like Dell and HP report profits in hundreds of millions or even more every year. From where do these profits come?

The cost of hardware is impossible to know unless one is in the business. For instance, eight years ago, I bought the same CD-ROM drive for $A110, $A60 and $A35, within a period of two weeks. The first was from one of the biggest retailers in Australia; the second was from a swap meet dealer. The third purchase was from a friend in the GNU/Linux business who had been given some external CD-ROMs by a hardware dealer to settle a debt; my friend said each had been costed at $A35 when settling the debt. (These external devices had casing and extra cables so the cost of the CD-ROM inside would have been somewhat less than $A35 had they been bought separately).