Photo: Jurvetson on Flickr.

An IBM press-release announces that they have joined forces with Canonical (Ubuntu), RedHat and SuSe/Novell in order to bring an alternate desktop solution to the market.

From the press-release:

“Citing shifting market forces and the growing demand for economical alternatives to costly Windows and Office-based computers, the four leaders sense an ideal set of circumstances allowing Linux-based desktops to proliferate in the coming year. Linux is far more profitable for a PC vendor and the operating system is better equipped to work with lower cost hardware than new Microsoft technology.”
[...]
“The four leaders are working with their local business partners in markets around the world to build and distribute a pre-loaded PC offering that features IBM’s Open Collaboration Client Solution (OCCS) (http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/library/occs-overview/) including Lotus Notes, Lotus Symphony and Lotus Sametime; the Linux operating system of each distributor; and software applications and installation services from the local partners in each market. The final product will be branded by the local IT firms that bring it to market. In addition, customers, independent software vendors (ISVs) and systems integrators have the choice of developing applications using Lotus Expeditor based on the open source Eclipse programming model.”

This fits in great right now as the economy is turning down and if CTO’s can cut license costs a bit, they will.

In my opinion, this is not one second too late and hopefully this initiative will open companies eyes to the world of Linux and “free” software.

Meanwhile, Microsoft dyes hair orange to cheer SQL Server 2008 release. Good luck with that.