Dell, Linux... and Mark Shuttleworth
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.
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Dell takes baby steps toward Linux
Thanks to Dell, soon it will be easier than ever to order a brand-new desktop or notebook PC with Linux pre-installed. But whether Dell's new program will really have an impact on the rate of Linux adoption in the enterprise is unclear at best.
When Dell solicited input from its customers on its IdeaStorm Web site, better and broader support for open source software topped the list of suggestions. After Linux, support for the OpenOffice.org productivity suite came in second place.
The sheer volume of votes in favor of open source shows every indication of a grassroots campaign at work. Dell might have expected as much. What is unexpected, perhaps, is the fact that Dell is actually listening to these voices.
"We're crafting product offerings in response," read a message posted to the Direct2Dell blog last Tuesday, "but we'd like a little more direct feedback from you."
But Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu's founder, thinks ignorance of the Linux market might be the least of Dell's worries. In a blog post, he points out that the realities of the PC hardware market make it unlikely that Dell could ever meet the Linux community's most optimistic expectations.
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