New Linux Moblin netbooks to be announced at IDF

IDG News Service - A new Linux netbook based on Moblin will be introduced this week, and it may represent a new way that the Linux community is approaching the mass market.

Leaders at the first Linuxcon Conference in Portland, Ore., hinted at an announcement to come this week at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco that they say will reassert Linux's momentum in the netbook market.

"You're going to see this week interesting new netbooks coming out that are killer. They have the cool factor and they're priced right," said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation.

Within a year, "no one will buy hardware or software," Zemlin said. Laptops will be free with a wireless service contract. Only free software, such as Linux, can support that model, he said. "Microsoft's economics don't fit into that at all."

While Linux initially had a larger portion of netbook market share, Microsoft has taken the lead. But that's not going to continue, due to market forces and new products, Zemlin said.

"Microsoft went in and gave away XP for free to shore up market share in an emerging space that's fast growing. But they can't sustain that forever, they can't do it with Windows 7," he said.

An Intel executive said Microsoft will raise prices to vendors with the release of Windows 7. "What I hear when I talk to netbook vendors is Microsoft does not want to repeat the extremely aggressive pricing with XP Home. They want to significantly increase the price for Windows 7 netbooks," said Dirk Hohndel, chief technology officer of Intel's Open Source Technology Center. XP Home is the Windows operating system that Microsoft sells for netbooks.

Ultimately he expects different tiers of netbooks. The low-tier, low-cost netbooks will ship with Linux and Moblin. A higher tier will cost more and will feature Windows 7, he said.

But beyond cost, there will be more significant differences between netbooks running Windows 7 and variants of Linux, he said. That goes to the heart of a change that leaders of the Linux community urged: Create something new and attractive rather than simply mimicking market leaders.

"We need to stop pretending that it will be a drop-in replacement [for Windows] and make it something better," said Bob Sutor, vice president for open source and Linux in IBM's software group. "This will be a major thing that determines the future. I think making it a complete drop-in solution is a dead-end strategy. They've got a little bit more money," he said, referring to Microsoft.

Microsoft has market share and mind share and in order to win either, Linux will need to find a niche based on "what it does really well at what price for which people," Sutor said.