February 28, 2007 at 16:00Dell Explains Open Source Position
In the past two weeks, the newly opened Idea Storm website , which serves as Dell's online book of offers , has undergone a massive “raid” of visitors supporting Open Source. During this time, they managed to advance to the very beginning of the line of proposals to start selling Dell PCs with preinstalled Linux OS, Open Office office suite and other open source software, providing an alternative to computers equipped with Microsoft products.
The principle of the site requires a mandatory reaction to the most popular ideas of users, so Dell was forced to respond to requests from Linux. In a special sectionOn the website, company representatives assured that they pay serious attention to all issues related to Open Source and understand that users want more flexible product lines.
However, not everything is so simple: there are at least a dozen popular Linux distributions and the company is not able to guarantee the stable operation of each of them on its equipment. And to choose one or even two of them - this means scaring away fans of other versions of the OS. However, for starters, Dell has certified the OptiPlex (dextops), Latitude (laptops) and Precision (powerful workstations) series for Novell SUSE Linux compatibility.
But it so happened that most of the Open Source community understood this as a promise that in the near future computers of these lines will be equipped with open source software, which put Dell in an uncomfortable position.
On Wednesday, according to Inquirer, the company issued a statement in which it further clarified that certification for compatibility with Linux and the willingness to begin distributing it are not the same thing. But, as stated in the statement, Dell is only at the beginning of the path of expanding work with Linux, and in the future we must wait for new news on this topic.
It is worth recalling that we recently wrote about the publication of some internal Microsoft documents, among which were plans to counteract the deepening cooperation between Dell and open source software manufacturers.
The principle of the site requires a mandatory reaction to the most popular ideas of users, so Dell was forced to respond to requests from Linux. In a special sectionOn the website, company representatives assured that they pay serious attention to all issues related to Open Source and understand that users want more flexible product lines.
However, not everything is so simple: there are at least a dozen popular Linux distributions and the company is not able to guarantee the stable operation of each of them on its equipment. And to choose one or even two of them - this means scaring away fans of other versions of the OS. However, for starters, Dell has certified the OptiPlex (dextops), Latitude (laptops) and Precision (powerful workstations) series for Novell SUSE Linux compatibility.
But it so happened that most of the Open Source community understood this as a promise that in the near future computers of these lines will be equipped with open source software, which put Dell in an uncomfortable position.
On Wednesday, according to Inquirer, the company issued a statement in which it further clarified that certification for compatibility with Linux and the willingness to begin distributing it are not the same thing. But, as stated in the statement, Dell is only at the beginning of the path of expanding work with Linux, and in the future we must wait for new news on this topic.
It is worth recalling that we recently wrote about the publication of some internal Microsoft documents, among which were plans to counteract the deepening cooperation between Dell and open source software manufacturers.