Did Canonical Just Get Punked by Red Hat and Novell?
One media outlet after another propagated the story theme: "Red Hat drops plans for consumer desktop development" Of course by the second or third wave this story, like the game of Telephone, has morphed into: "Red Hat Abandons Desktop! Aieee!" Which industry pundits immediately jumped on and used as "proof" for their long-waning arguments: "See? Even Red Hat sez that Linux on the desktop is no work-y. Told ya so!"
Curiously, very little attention was paid to Ron Hovespian's comments on Novell's similar plans, made before Red Hat's. If I were Novell, I would take this as a bad sign.
My first opinion during all of this hooplah was that why should I care about Red Hat and SUSE Linux not having a consumer desktop line? It doesn't detract from the Linux desktop as a whole (since their business desktop products are doing just fine, thank you), plus let's face it: Ubuntu is kicking butt and taking names on the consumer desktop market already. Let that community and Canonical be the flagship for the Linux consumer desktop. In open source, it's all good anyway.
Except I think I may have both been wrong.
Also:
Lots of people are up in arms because Red Hat’s desktop team released a statement containing this: “we have no plans to create a traditional desktop product for the consumer market in the foreseeable future”, and Ron Hovsepian said “Novell’s Suse Linux at the desktop is unlikely to be popular with consumers in the next three to five years”. To me, this is not defeatism, it is simply an example of positioning in action.
The people who feel betrayed at statements like these should really rejoice that the consumer Linux desktop has become significant enough to warrant comment at all! We’ve come a long way.
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