Sun's desktop plan doesn't delight

26 Oct 2005

Sun is still trying to flog its desktop dead horse. It now plans to offer JDS to Linux vendors, so they can include include it in their distributions.

The problems with this seem two-fold. First, they haven't worked out a price. Given a choice between the free desktop systems available now and the Sun Java Desktop System, I know which I'd go for if I were Red Hat. I'd also have to pass those costs on to the end user, which is death in what is effectively a commodity market. If Sun wants JDS to be a standard, they should just open it up and license it for free.

The second problem is that there are some good desktop systems out there. Sure, there's no single standard, but KDE and Gnome are both de facto standards. To shift the whole Linux market over to a new desktop standard will require mindshare, compelling technology and a cost of zero. JDS offers none of that.

Sorry, Sun. Must try harder.

Posted by Rob on Wednesday, October 26, 2005 at 10:30 AM | 0 TrackBacks

Filed in ,

Leave a comment

Gallery

Prev Next

Recent Entries

  • MT 4.1 now out

    Movable Type 4.1 is now available, I notice. I gave it a try today and while there are obvious improvements everywhere, there are a couple...

  • MT4: Finally made it

    Finally. I've done it. I've made the switch. With the slight exception of MT Blogroll, which I can do without for now (but which...

  • MT4: nearly there

    Tried again with my bi-weekly MT4 upgrade attempt. We're nearly there now, I reckon. Simply Threaded was giving me some problems and not showing...

  • MT-MyBlogLog

    I've been trying to 'Voxify' my media blog of late. That's included comment threading, relative dates, changes to stylesheets, etc. But the biggest change...

  • MT4: not yet

    The observant will have noticed that I've still not migrated my blogs over to MT4. I did have an abortive attempt at it last...

Close