On Wed, 2007-03-14 at 23:12 -0600, David G. Miller wrote: > "Paul Osunero" <esiex3@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > The discussion at the dell blog shows that people really want Ubuntu first, > > Fedora second, and Suse third out of the big three. To be honest, Ubuntu > > makes more sense because they'll have legal codecs from Linspire's CNR and > > they have commercial support. Fedora lacks these things right now... > The best thing Dell could do for FOSS would be to offer systems that are > fully supported (hardware) by open source drivers. This approach would > allow them to just confirm that as many distros as they choose to test > install correctly and work on the hardware. It would also leave the > choice of whether to use proprietary codecs up to the individual > end-user and Dell stays out of the whole licensing, copyright, patent > mess. I agree in principle. I suspect that they will be using ATI or Nvidia cards in which case I do think they should ship the "good" drivers, despite them not being FOSS Furthermore, I don't believe it would cost them much (if anything) per unit to ship gstreamer plugins for mp3 and DVD playback. > The plus for FOSS would be increased pressure on various hardware > manufacturers to release open source drivers or sufficient > specifications that the community can develop non-proprietary drivers In a perfect world it would. I don't think it will in the real world. > (even if Linux systems turn out to be only a small percentage of Dell > sales, the number of people opting for particular hardware because it's > supported by open source would be significant). > > If Dell goes with a specific distro, I'd expect it to be RHEL or SLED. > One of Dell's primary concerns will be the cost of support and I'm > guessing that bundling a Linux distro support license would 1) look like > their Windows business model and 2) solve the support problem. I expect they will use RHEL on business class machines and something like Fedora or Ubuntu on less expensive machines. But speculating is only speculating. If I could really get into the head of Michael Dell - I'd be rich right now ...
