White Hats, Black Hats, Red Hats

Red Hat has just recently announced that they will no longer be offering the basic, free Red Hat Linux distribution and will only sell and support their Red Hat Enterprise Linux package, meant primarily for businesses. Their CEO has also come right out and said that “I would say that for the consumer market place, Windows probably continues to be the right product line.”

There is already much wailing and gnashing of teeth about how Red Hat has turned traitor, this is a slap in the face, blah blah blah. And I have to say…I don’t care.

Not just because I don’t use Red Hat on my systems, but because Red Hat simply isn’t obligated to push Linux onto the desktop. One of the great things about the Linux world is that you’re free to do whatever you want with it, and if Red Hat feels that their best chance of success is to focus on the business market, then they’re perfectly free to do so. There are plenty of other distributions out there, so if the others think they can do a better job on the desktop, now’s the time for them to take their shot.

Is their CEO right about Windows? Well, partly… Although Linux is perfectly viable, the desktop market they speak of extends all the way down to people who barely know where to plug things in and what to do with the funny-coloured round thing in the jewel case. Vendors have already dumbed down the installation process to their level, but mostly only on Windows. You can grab any random piece of hardware at the store and be assured that there will be full Windows drivers right in the box, but there’s no guarantee that it will work on Linux at all unless you check complex device support charts first. That’s not really Linux’s fault since it should be up to the vendor to provide the drivers, but it’s a chicken-and-egg problem. Linux is great once you’ve selected the proper hardware for it and installed and configured everything properly, but not everyone has a Linux guru handy to help them out.

It’s all perfectly fine to me — I’m a hobbyist user, not a casual desktop user, so all these little quirks and such don’t really bother me.