Intel, Novell stump for Moblin netbook OS
Intel and Novell on Thursday announced a deal to push Moblin, the open source Linux platform designed to work with the chip giant's Atom chip. Intel cooked up Moblin and then handed it off to the open source community. — Among the details of the plan:
Context & Ripple Effects
This deal is the software half of an Atom strategy Intel has been building since 2007, when it started pitching Internet-capable pocket devices and joined the OLPC effort via its One Laptop per Child partnership. Having built Moblin itself and then handed it to the open source community, Intel now needs a commercial Linux house to carry it onto actual netbooks — and Novell, which shipped SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 in March 2009, is that house.
The timing matters on both sides: Intel reported a $647 million first-quarter profit in April and said the PC industry may have bottomed out, so netbook volume is the growth lane worth defending. Meanwhile Nvidia's February 2009 Ion platform is contesting the same low-cost-PC designs, making a matched Atom-plus-Moblin stack a way for Intel to sell silicon and system software as one package.
First-order effects
- Novell gains a consumer-facing distribution channel for its Linux work beyond enterprise SUSE customers, with its name attached to netbooks shipping on Atom silicon.
- Netbook OEMs get a vendor-backed Linux option tuned for Atom, reducing dependence on whatever OS licensing terms the market's default supplier offers.
Second-order effects
- Nvidia's Ion pitch to the same netbook makers now has to compete against an integrated Intel chip-plus-OS bundle, pushing platform vendors toward system-level selling rather than components alone.
- Other commercial Linux players face pressure to find equivalent hardware partners, since Novell now holds the marquee mobile-Linux reference deal.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, chipmakers increasingly seed open source projects themselves and hand them to the community as a way to guarantee software exists for their silicon — an OS treated as an attach rate for hardware, not a product line.
- Commercial Linux vendors consolidate around hardware alliances rather than selling distributions standalone, making the chip partner, not the distro, the center of gravity.
The trend: Silicon vendors are seeding their own open source operating systems and recruiting commercial Linux distributors to carry them, turning OS support into an extension of chip-platform competition.