Linux users fearful of desktop demise

Two major moves by well-known Linux companies have the open-source community worried that the consumer is being left behind.

On Monday, in an expected move, Red Hat said it would stop supporting all consumer versions of Red Hat Linux by the end of April 2004 and only planned to support its business version of the operating system.

On Tuesday, enterprise software maker Novell announced an agreement to buy Linux maker SuSE for $210m.

For the business world, the deals seemingly confirmed the corporate role for the community operating system. However, many Linux enthusiasts worry that the Linux community may have lost its two most popular distributions - Red Hat Linux and SuSE Linux - in a corporate equivalent of a one-two punch.

Jack Alderson, a Linux and Sun systems administrator, said: "When you go into a [shop], the only versions of Linux that you can find on the shelves are Red Hat and SuSE."

Alderson now fears that Novell will stop creating consumer-oriented versions of SuSE Linux, which he uses at home.

"With Red Hat's announcement, that pulled them off of the shelf and out of the general public's view. All there was left was SuSE. Now that's going to disappear also," he said.

The moves could return consumers to a choice of Linux distributions from smaller companies--such as Mandrake, Xandros or Lindows - or from community projects such as Debian, Fedora, Gentoo and Slackware.

Novell appears to be planning to carry SuSE's open-source torch, but it hasn't made specific comments regarding lower-priced versions of its Linux products.

Novell CEO Jack Messman said in a conference call: "Novell is committed to the open-source community. With SuSE, we gain access to and will continue to actively support key SuSE-sponsored open-source initiatives."

Arthur Tyde, the founder and former president of the Bay Area Linux Users' Group, is optimistic about SuSE remaining a choice for consumers. SuSE Linux 9 has already been released, and he fully expects to see the next version at retail.

"I think it is wait and see," he said. "It might not affect the community at all. From a consumer standpoint, I think you will still see SuSE Linux in [the shops]."

Moreover, while some have viewed troubled Novell's purchase plans as a potential threat to SuSE, Tyde said that Novell is just getting a second chance and who knows what the company will do with SuSE.

"You have to think about what they are really buying," he said. "They are not buying the rights to all that code. They are buying credibility to that space."

And, Tyde said, for Novell to gain credibility in the Linux community means keeping consumer product on the shelves.

Robert Lemos writes for News.com