I have been vindicated for my views in my previous post. Dell has been steadily expanding its Ubuntu line with the new Inspiron 1420( which quite frankly has me drooling as a fan of 14″ notebooks).
Dell is also extending its Linux offers to foreign countries in the near future, as well as support for small businesses!
Then there was another debacle. Seems the Vista version of the new 1420 was, after some free upgrades and coupons, $225 cheaper than the Ubuntu version. Again the vocal community outcried this injustice. The fine gents over at Dell quickly corrected the mistake.I found two interesting things from this.
1) Dell quickly corrected it and appologized for the inconvenience and incongruency. Lets face it, Dell has never had to deal with duplicate pages for the same computer but different OS’s. Granted it would be easier if were all on one page, but Dell chose to do it this way, and is listening to customer complaints! Bravo!
2) People weren’t as outraged this time. Even Slashdot, that hot-bed of FOSS fanatics wasn’t in a huge uproar. I think Dell has now been accepted as a legitimate offerer of Linux, and this quick correction will do everything to support this opinion.
Now some people, notably the person on DeveloperSide, think that the reason that Dell is being so freindly towards Linux is to promote Dell in the eyes of the influential techie community. Sounds logical? Yeah, it does. It is true? Maybe, but i’m willing to believe not. Even if it is, they are giving the Linux community the chance to show that they will put their money where their mouth is. And I believe that the Linux community is, which is why they are expanding the Linux offer to other countries.
Or maybe i’m just an optimist.
