A User Manufacurer Tug of War

The ASUS EeePC is making a lot of headlines recently, mostly positive. The EeePC is a small footprint laptop with a 7 inch screen and a weight undr a kilo. It's more portable than a laptop yet much more powerfull than a PDA. The initial price was expected to be $200 which created quite a stir, but it has now become a little more expensive.

In order to hit the low price point and also not waste too many CPU cycles, a GNU Linux System was choose as operting system (Xandros to be more pecific but you could run Ubuntu too). In order to make the Linux kernel run on the EeePC, ASUS had to modify some drivers, mostly wirleless drivers. ASUS has however been slow to publish their modifictions as required by the GPL licene their bound to since their work build on the Linux kernel and associated drivers. They have also failed to comply with some other aspects of the license, minly related to attribution of original developers.

For users of the EeePC its not directly an issue. As an end user of GPL protected software you do generaly not publish the code itself (or derivates) so no worry, but ASUS on the other hand is selling the EeepPC and so has to publish it's source.

So why doesen't ASUS just publish the source? One could be they just want to stall competitors. I have another theory: In my work as consultant I have encountered a lot of resistance to open source due to worries that users will modify the items they have purchased which will lead to increased maintainance and support costs if/when users with all kind of modified systems call support.

Remember: the main reson to use a GPL licensed systems is your right to modify the system in any wy to fit your needs and help your fellows by sharing those enhancements.

So in one way we have a GPL licensed system giving users the power to modify their systems to suite their needs. On the other hand we have the manufacturers who would like users NOT to modify their systems in order to streamline their support.

This is what I call a tug of war between the users and the manufacturers.

Perhaps ASUS do understands GPL a lot better than we think: that GPL can drive support cost they don't want to pay for. If this is so, the futere for ASUS is eiter non-GPL or they sooner or later will have to find a business model that transforms product sales only into product sales and aditional support sales.

GPL is not a technical issue, as the world is waking up to understand, it's a business model issue.