Red Hat - not losing Dell but gaining a Google

With one day to go before Red Hat's annual user conference kicks off here in sunny San Diego, the rumour mill seems to be picking up – and there is some good news and bad news for the Linux distributor.

First the bad news, it seems that long-standing Red Hat partner Dell has jumped into bed with rival Linux distro-purveyor Novell. Just when it looked like Dell was winning some hearts and minds in the open source community, with its support (albeit begrudging) for Ubuntu as a desktop OS, the PC maker has joined the hitherto two-some between Novell and Microsoft. The deal between Novell and Microsoft- mainly based around servers – is underpinned by some foggy deal over patents which saw buckets of cash change hands between the two vendors when it was announced late last year. What this means for Red Hat is unclear but things are sure to be frostier with Dell in future.(Interestingly its almost two years to the day since Michael Dell put nearly $100m into Red Hat back in May 2005)

And now the good news, rumours are floating about of a deal between Red Hat and fluffy online search behemoth Google with various tie-ups being touted including Red Hat's latest operating system – RHEL 5 – or a version there of – being used as the OS for a Google phone? The other more plausible sounding plan is Google's collection of Microsoft challenging online-applications being bundled with RHEL on desktop machines – the Microsoft killer the industry has been waiting for. For some reason neither Red Hat or Novell have been very aggressive about the desktop to date – afraid of being laughed out of court – or just not believing that the revenues are worth chasing – maybe that could be all about to change? The next three days in San Diego should shed some light on which if any of these rumours is anything more – but if you have any issues or questions you want me to chase – add them to the comments section of below.