Dell and Ubuntu: why bother?

Sam Varghese
Wednesday, 23 May 2007 09:18

Opinion and Analysis

I have a question for Michael Dell - why is he trying to be cute about the company's foray into selling boxes with Ubuntu installed? In the normal course of things, Dell would do it all very formally - a press release, a media conference, a briefing to analysts and so on.

On the contrary what we have here is a company email which is leaked, information put on a website which is claimed to be "one-2-one communications with Dell" - come on, who is the company trying to impress? Why is there this highly artificial effort to make it appear that things are being done at Dell in the same way as they would be done in a FOSS project?

There's one word in my lexicon to describe what Dell is going to do with Ubuntu - half-arsed. Something that's done because there's no wriggle room at all, no way of getting out of the whole thing without looking quite silly.

Have a look at the "one-2-one communication" from Dell (I've italicised parts of it below):

"The peripheral options offered with Ubuntu will be a subset of what is offered with other operating systems. We're offering the hardware options on each system that have the most mature and stable Linux driver support. These hardware options have been thoroughly tested by the Linux team here at Dell."

This means the oldest and most reliable hardware will be trotted out - and few, if any, will want peripherals of that vintage. This is one step which is guaranteed to keep the sales volume low.

"We configure/install open source drivers for hardware, when possible. We use partial open-source or closed source ("restricted" in Ubuntu terms) drivers where there is no equivalent open-source driver. This includes Intel wireless cards and Conexant modems."

Lovely. The kind of unholy mess that this will result in will have to be seen to be believed. I can't wait to see what Dell comes up with.