The guy who funded Ubuntu has come out and said that it’s not possible to make money with desktop Linux, but that value-added services have to accompany the brand adoption of his Linux distibution, Ubuntu. Ie. services earn revenue; software licenses don’t. Wait a minute, isn’t this what Red Hat said about Linux 12 years ago? Seriously. This isn’t news, and it isn’t a new strategy.
What really cracks me up is the collective refusal by our industry talking heads to accept the fact that the market will not tolerate a third desktop OE competitor. Add to that this notion of cloud computing (which itself is somewhat overblown, if not more compelling than the free software “movement”), and you’ve got all the evidence in the world that Apple and Microsoft NEED NOT WORRY about Linux, whether it’s Ubuntu, Fedora, or some other funny-named flavor.
The world (or 99.95% of it) just doesn’t care about Linux on the desktop, yet the commentators in the industry keep pulling for desktop Linux as if it was “the little engine who could”. Show me something desktop Linux brings to the table that Windows and Mac OS X don’t, and I’ll show you a product that probably STILL won’t succeed against the established players, even when it’s FREE. We’re too entrenched, too invested, and too resistant to learning curves to ever considering a sizable swing to desktop Linux.
So all you GNU purists and techno-hippies–give up the ghost already. It’s over.
