Sam Varghese
Thursday, 26 March 2009 04:35
Opinion and Analysis
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What does one make of a statement from the chief of the biggest commercial Linux company to the effect that Linux cannot be a success on the desktop?
At a roundtable held at a conference in San Francisco, Red Hat's chief executive officer Jim Whitehurst is
reported as having raised several concerns about Linux on the desktop; his first concern was that he did not know how to make money off desktop Linux.
Whitehurst also questioned where the desktop would be in five years given the spread of cloud computing, smartphone-based computing and virtual desktop infrastructure.
(Many others, including Scott McNealy and Larry Ellison questioned the future of the desktop PC in earlier years, yet we all still use desktops.)
On the other hand, Novell's chief executive Ron Hovsepian, who spoke alongside Microsoft's Sam Ramji (is that a surprise?) at a different session of the same conference, was
more optimistic about the future of Linux on the desktop.
(The IDC survey cited in
the link above says only one thing: companies that already use Linux are looking to use more of it. It does not say a thing more.)
So why would Whitehurst offer such comments? I can see a few reasons why he is doing so, not least being the fact that Novell has just released version 11 of its SUSE Linux Enterprise distribution, using which it hopes to hone in on the desktop.
One
reviewer describes it as the nearest thing to a Windows desktop that is still Linux. I don't have firsthand information of SLED 11, apart from
some rather peculiar behaviour.
Red Hat once tried to sell Linux on the desktop. There were various initiatives, including crafting a desktop combining GNOME (mostly) and KDE, an act that made everyone unhappy. It did not go anywhere.
Additionally, Red Hat was done out of a few big desktop deals at the last minute by undercutting from Redmond. This has happened to Sun as well, with its JDS desktop distribution.
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