MeeGo Linux: a toddle too far

Linux now has a pretty long and honourable history, a remarkable achievement given that it started as a one-man band, and has grown organically as people were drawn into the project.

In the 1990s, many commentators, including yours truly, questioned how the OSS business model could survive in a harsh capitalist world that valued cash above all else. Who would want to give away their time for others? Who would pay for an OS where they couldn't, as a paying customer, point the finger?

Those questions have long since been answered, and I don't propose to revisit those issues here -- save to say that commerce has, to a large extent, saved the day. Companies like Red Hat helped blaze the trail by developing a successful and much-copied business model: give the software away but charge for support. It's a model that works and addresses the big issues that enterprises might have over community-developed software.

Now you find Linux everywhere, even in servers buried deep in humongous datacentres. At the other extreme, you also find it on desktops, laptops and even netbooks. And it's here that I'd argue that the commercial model has been less successful.

Purchase price sensitivity is high in this area and, even if you exclude the religious nutter fan-boi types, giving the software away works because the OS is mature, secure and stable, and because the pleasure in developing an OS aimed at individuals offers more of an incentive than writing it for faceless corporations, and helps ensure that it stays at the cutting edge. Although let's not forget that many developers do, of course, work for commercial software houses.

Even so, a bum note sounds when you start to bolt onto that open source, free software model a commercially developed version of Linux for netbooks. The thought was prompted by the arrival of a press release this morning from Novell, announcing that: "it will release SUSE(R) MeeGo as a fully supported operating system for netbooks."

Novell carries on: "SUSE MeeGo is built on the codestream from the MeeGo Project, the new Linux-based operating system established by Intel and Nokia".

MeeGo? What kind of name is that? Baby-talk is fine for children of toddling age but how many people would be happy to watch their OS boot up on the train with a big MeeGo splash? The name sounds like a classic example of a lowest common denominator filtered through a committee. Several committees.

Novell has mixed enterprise culture, with which it's comfortable -- evidenced by ungrammatical marketing-speak such as this: "Novell’s support of MeeGo only further establishes their commitment to enhancing the mobile Linux experience" -- with projects aimed at end-users.

Yet MeeGo is a development of Moblin, a version of Linux aimed at mobile devices -- and has a perfectly respectable name. Why not call it that? Or GoLin? Or WalkLin? Both names took me 10 seconds to think up.

Novell has been great over the years at developing products for enterprise use. But MeeGo is a toddle too far, methinks.