Red Hat launches Global Desktop

Open-source specialist Red Hat is preparing a major push around the desktop, with a three-pronged strategy.

Speaking at the company's annual user conference in San Diego on Wednesday, Red Hat chief executive Matthew Szulik claimed, in his opening keynote, that the company would be making announcements around the "the long-anticipated pursuit of the desktop".

Red Hat's desktop strategy will be based around three product areas. The first is the Global Desktop, due to be launched next month, which will be aimed at governmental organisations and small businesses in the developing world. To be launched next month, the desktop OS will borrow heavily — up to 95 percent of its code in fact — from the work done by Red Hat around the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) scheme, or $100 PC project as it is also known.

But in a move that is sure to irk OLPC partner AMD, the Global Desktop project will see Red Hat partner with AMD's rival Intel. Indeed, the project appears at this launch phase to be entirely based around new scaled-down hardware devices developed by Intel for the developing world via its World Ahead Program. These include the Intel Classmate PC and the Affordable PC.

"To address the demand for Linux on desktop systems by our customers in emerging markets, Intel and Red Hat worked together to deliver pre-certified, cost-effective solutions for Intel's reseller channel to extend their business value," said Steve Dallman, general manager of Intel's worldwide reseller channel organisation.

Despite the altruistic wrapping given to this announcement, the Global Desktop will not be made available as a download or shipped on a CD, according to Red Hat spokespeople. This will effectively mean that anyone who wants to use it will have to buy new and relatively expensive hardware. This will effectively rule out the vast numbers of government departments and educational establishments in the developing world that opt to use repurposed machines donated by IT charities such as UK-based Computer Aid.

The other parts of Red Hat's desktop strategy are based around existing products — namely Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL 5), which was launched on 14 March, and the OLPC project. The RHEL 5 desktop is obviously aimed at the enterprise market but Red Hat did not disclose many more concrete details on what it will be doing to convince more large businesses to adopt desktop Linux — aside from plans to improve desktop management. 

Instead, Red Hat chose to do some crystal-ball gazing on the future of the desktop. The term "online desktop" was alluded to by Red Hat chief technical officer Brian Stevens in his keynote. "The desktop platform is dead — it is a dinosaur — we don't believe that reproducing the Windows paradigm in open source adds anything to the user experience," he said. "We are trying to break the paradigm — users don't process documents in isolation — the most interesting apps are online services, such as Google Docs."

Szulik repeated claims that the open-source specialist had no desire to repeat the mistakes of other companies that had tried to challenge Microsoft on the desktop. "We are not trying to replicate the existing paradigm — those guys are not around anymore — otherwise we would have bought Corel five years ago." Red Hat's strategy was less around "presentation layer" and more about "management of distributed devices", the Red Hat chief claimed.

Red Hat and rival Novell have been reluctant to make too much noise around the desktop to date — preferring to concentrate on the established and lucrative business around server-side Linux.

After years of hype and interest from open-source enthusiasts, it appears that some momentum is finally building around the Linux desktop. PC maker Dell recently caved into pressure from its user base, which used a forum set up by the company to demand desktops and laptops with pre-installed Linux. Dell acquiesced and announced last month that it would now ship PCs with the Ubuntu Linux distribution installed, although those PCs will not initially be available in the UK.

Dell also announced on Monday that it would join an established alliance between Novell and Microsoft — which will see the PC and server maker support the alleged interoperability drive — particularly around server virtualisation.

Responding to questions about how the Novell, Dell and Microsoft triumvirate would impact Red Hat, Szulik refused to be drawn on specifics, but said that his customers were interested in real interoperability at the data level and he wouldn't do anything to jeopardise advances made around open standards. "We have engaged with Microsoft; we would like nothing more [than] to work with open standards and vendor-neutral standards. We don't want to see standards-based activities compromised," he said. "Novell has a long standing relationship with Dell — Red Hat has a productive relationship with Dell and will continue to do so."