Red Hat to focus on enterprise market, not consumer Linux

April 17, 2008 – 4:19 PM

Once upon a time when you mentioned Linux to non-Linux users, the first thing they thought of was Red Hat. That’s because the company was one of the first and most successful to get its desktop Linux onto retail shelves. But in a blog post today, the Red Hat team notes that they will not be working on a consumer version of their Linux product in the foreseeable future, instead focusing on enterprise software.

In a nutshell, the company has concluded that while Linux has come to be popular as an operating system for servers, it’s hard to build a business model around Linux desktop software. If you look at the desktop OS field, Linux is starting to make mild gains on Windows and OS X, but desktop Linux users are still few and far between when compared with users of the two more dominant platforms. And most of the popular Linux desktop operating systems are not just open source, they’re free as in beer.

The Fedora desktop Linux operating system is based on Red Hat and will continue to be developed. But all of Red Hat’s commercial software will now be designed to compliment the company’s server and middleware software.

Source: Download Squad