Red Hat boss dismisses desktop fight

 

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By Stuart Turton

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."