Open source is often the flag that’s flown after failure. When IBM (IBM) failed in operating systems two decades ago, it slowly began embracing Linux, eventually unifying its whole product line under the open source operating system. The results were spectacular.
At the OSCON conference in Portland, an annual convention for the open source industry, Dell (DELL) said it wanted to do the same thing. It even released laptops that run under Linux.
While this move may lead to bad jokes among some, it’s aimed at a fairly small part of the market, open source developers, and is made in the hope these developers might then contribute to Dell’s ongoing cloud efforts.