Fedora - DELL ?
Michael A Peters
mpeters at mac.com
Thu Mar 15 06:08:15 UTC 2007
On Wed, 2007-03-14 at 23:12 -0600, David G. Miller wrote:
> "Paul Osunero" <esiex3 at gmail.com> 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 ...
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