Red Hat Stays Out Of Desktop Linux Market
The Raleigh, N.C.-based company said instead it is focusing on more salient projects like Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop, Fedora and Red Hat Global Desktop (RHGD), which is designed for placement in emerging markets. Though Linux has found a home in the enterprise world on servers made by industry giants IBM and Dell, efforts by the open source community to capture the consumer desktop market have so far been unsuccessful.
"Building a sustainable business around the Linux desktop is tough, and history is littered with example efforts that have either failed outright, are stalled or are run as charities," the post read. "[The market] suffers from having one dominant vendor, and some people still perceive that today's Linux desktops simply don't provide a practical alternative."
Red Hat Chief Technology Officer Brian Stevens told Reuters on Tuesday obtaining rights to distribute one of the components of the operating system -- specifically, software for playing music and viewing videos -- had been more difficult than anticipated. "It's one of those things. It's worse to sell (just) 100,000 units than to sell zero -- because of the commitment you make," he said. "Right now we are sizing the global opportunity."