Who cares what Michael Dell says?

Who cares what Michael Dell says?

Posted Oct 13, 2005 13:37 UTC (Thu) by brugolsky (subscriber, #28)
Parent article: How many is too many?

C'mon, LWN isn't Slashdot. What possible relation could Michael Dell have to Linux? He sells sub-standard equipment (like the Intel EM64T) with pre-loaded operating systems from Microsoft. He cares not one iota for the values of choice inherent in free software; if you want vanilla, he's your guy.

[No offense meant to Matt Domsch and the other Linux techs at Dell, but they ought to understand this better than anyone.]

A long time ago, Dell sold Dell UNIX SVR4, and it was good: compiled with gcc, included free software, had excellent tech support, etc. But that was 1991.

Today their tech support is outsourced to some novice reading from a script.

Even buying a dual-CPU Windows XP workstation from them is fraught with hassle and delay. The BIOSes in their machines are notoriously bad. And it takes them an additional seven days to turn on RAID-1 mirroring in Windows XP!

Dell got rich selling vanilla. He might sell chocolate if you pester him. Strawberry is nowhere in sight.

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