Ubuntu Takes a Page from Red Hat's Playbook

David Wolf submits: CNET has a decent article on Friday by Stephen Shankland about how Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, plans on building a global business by giving away its software and selling service, a strategy originally adopted by the current major Linux marketer, Red Hat (RHAT), which it has since rejected. The article takes a rather dim view of the approach, questioning whether that's going to make it for Mark Shuttleworth and his band of South African software revolutionaries.

Laugh on, CNET, but in China I don't think anyone would so much as giggle. As the nice folks over at Microsoft (MSFT) and the Business Software Alliance will happily tell you, it's proving exceptionally hard to talk people in China into paying for software that can be downloaded in a zip file or shrinkwrapped and sold at a counter. I'm not sure it's going to get any easier.