Red Hat boss dismisses desktop fight

 

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Posted on 26 Mar 2009 at 08:49

Red Hat chief executive Jim Whitehurst has admitted he has doubts about pushing Linux on the desktop.

Whitehurst was participating in a roundtable event at the Open Source Business Conference dubbed "End Users and Linux: Do We Have a Participation Problem?"

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However, when conversation turned to the best way of promoting Linux uptake on the desktop, Whitehurst admitted to being unsure if it was even necessary: "First of all, I don't know how to make money on it," he said, according to a report on Infoworld.

"Very few people are running a desktop that's mission-critical," he argued, claiming that as a result few users were willing to pay for a desktop operating system. "We do have a desktop [version of Linux], but we typically sell it to big server customers who want some desktops."

Whitehurst went on to suggest that his doubts about pushing Linux on the desktop - as Canonical has successfully done with Ubuntu - has more to do with the arrival of cloud-based and smartphone computing than any issues with Linux.

"The concept of a desktop is kind of ridiculous in this day and age," said Whitehurst. "I'd rather think about skating to where the puck is going to be than where it is now."

Author: Stuart Turton