[dman]

I agree, but Redhat is staring at a billion dollar annual revenue. Innovation follows platforms that people want to use in their own spare time. Redhat needs to make this happen in the long term or they risk ending up like Solaris where no one wants to use them after 5pm.

[SecurityMatters]

There are a couple of different problems here. RedHat is actually pretty good in that they only include open software in their distribution. I, and many others, would not trust the OS nearly as much if they included things like Flash or other binary only blobs. These binary blobs could be doing anything. We know Flash works against the user's interest, and who knows what other binary piece might do?

Secondly, how would they license? Most of the code they could license requires a charge per copy. RedHat , Ubuntu and most Linux distros encourage the free redistribution of their disks. You can download it for free(aside from bandwidth charges which RedHat is not involved with. They don't even know how many copies are really in use. So, either they would have to change their whole distribution model or they would have to pay for something that is fairly nebulous. Fluendo has published a version of the MP3 codec that can be distributed for free. They purchased a license that has no per copy costs, but that is unusual to even have that as an option.

Finally, the RedHat company produces the RedHat distro for commercial use and the Fedora distro for home use. There is an active community of Fedora users who happily use it after 5 PM and you can find how to get most codecs working in Fedora, if you search a bit. The freedoms associated with Linux make it much more pleasant to use that any proprietary solution available today. I would also say Linux is more powerful and easy to use, but I can see how not everyone would agree about those, since your experience and workflows can drive those comparisons. OpenSolaris was making good progress. It is a shame it was killed a little before it got to the point where it was usable for everyday duty for the average person.

[dman]

I think a large majority in the world is in the "I dont mind paying 2 bucks now and then but dont make me go searching for a solution on a technology forum because I couldnt care less about how to get it to work".

[arianb]

RedHat isn't interested in making a desktop OS, though. Their focus is on the enterprise market, with the Fedora team doing their best to make a desktop OS. It would be very difficult for RedHat or Novell to really make a push into the mainstream desktop market, and I imagine that justifying to their shareholders would be impossible.

The desktop distro teams can't organize enough to get support from major companies, and the enterprise companies can't push into desktop because it's financial suicide to try and support normal desktop users who can barely use Windows.