Red Hat CEO: Significant Barriers in Switching to Linux on the Desktop

      by Wyatt Walter

Yesterday at the Open Source Business Conference, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst shared his thoughts on why Linux on the desktop is irrelevant to Red Hat. Whitehurst says that financial reasons as well as practical reasons are barriers to the market for Linux. For one, he says, that he’s not quite sure how one would make money doing it. An interesting point, indeed. One of the biggest advantages of running a distribution of Linux such as, say Ubuntu, is the cost. If you can eliminate the “Windows tax” by building a machine, the cost of the OS is free. That cost is what drives quite a few people to the platform. There is, of course, significant value in the software as well. The freedom to choose an operating system is really what Linux is all about, but trying to sell Linux on the desktop, Whitehurst says, is not even being considered. He also notes that a lot of Linux developers prefer to have Macs as their workstations.

The other reason the CEO says that it’s pointless is the fact that the desktop is, in effect, going away. Quoting the famous Wayne Gretzky, he says that he’d “rather think about skating to where the puck is going to be than where it is now.” If the netbook market, cloud computing, and virtualization is where we’re headed, then it is certainly not worth it to Red Hat or any other Linux distribution to try to compete with Microsoft on the game that’s almost over, but rather getting a head start on the game that’s just beginning.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (1) : Mar 26th, 2009

One Response to “Red Hat CEO: Significant Barriers in Switching to Linux on the Desktop”

  1. Why Windows Needs ‘the Cloud’ To Fail | What a n00b! Says:
    March 26th, 2009 at 7:02 pm

    [...] to the traditional software licensing software used by Microsoft. Red Hat has all but conceded victory to Microsoft in the traditional desktop world where we depend upon desktop-based applications. However, they are [...]

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