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Linux on Netbooks: The Smoking Gun

By Pamela Jones et al.

If you have been having trouble finding Linux on a netbook, you can stop wondering why. I suspected it was being monopoly-crushed. Here's the smoking gun, at last, thanks to Dana Blankenhorn of ZDNet, who attended Comdex and asked the right question:

Later, at a press conference sponsored by TAITRA, the Taiwan trade authority, I asked executive director Walter Yeh (third from left in this picture) about where the Linux went.

He passed the question to Li Chang (to the right in the picture), vice president of the Taipei Computer Association.

Chang mentioned a press conference yesterday where Google announced an Android phone to be made by Acer. But then he put it to me straight.

"In our association we operate as a consortium, like the open source consortium. They want to promote open source and Linux. But if you begin from the PC you are afraid of Microsoft. They try to go to the smart phone or PDA to start again."

Taiwanese OEMs would love an alternative to Windows, but the sale comes first, before production. The chicken comes first. And since the chicken belongs to Microsoft, the penguin is helpless here.

Mystery solved. Totally blatant. Does this not give legs to Charlie Demerjian's report, MS steps on a Snapdragon? It appears Snapdragon on Asus is just the most recent horse to fall down shot in the starting gate and then get dragged off the track.

So next time you hear Microsoft bragging that people *prefer* their software to Linux on netbooks, you'll know better. If they really believed that, they'd let the market speak, on a level playing field.

If I say my horse is faster than yours, and you says yours is faster, and we let our horses race around the track, that establishes the point. But if you shoot my horse, that leaves questions in the air. Is your horse *really* faster? If so, why shoot my horse?

Full post as published by Groklaw on June 19, 2009 (boomark / email).