The Red Hat Desktop Team announced Wednesday:
we have no plans to create a traditional desktop product for the consumer market in the foreseeable future. [...]
as a public, for-profit company, Red Hat must create products and technologies with an eye on the bottom line, and with desktops this is much harder to do than with servers. The desktop market suffers from having one dominant vendor, and some people still perceive that today’s Linux desktops simply don’t provide a practical alternative. [...]
Nevertheless, building a sustainable business around the Linux desktop is tough, and history is littered with example efforts that have either failed outright, are stalled or are run as charities.
I guess by "charities" they're referring to the Ubuntu Foundation.
Since Red Hat is one of the leading distributors and open source developers, I'm quite unsatisfied with it's attitude towards Canonicals business model and Ubuntu's success story.
Ubuntu was a huge success because Shuttleworth decided to charge for support and service. Red Hat still charges for software updates on their Enterprise Distributions.
With Fedora, Red Hat patronizes a great and free distribution. Instead of adopting Canonicals business model and strengthen Fedoras support, Red Hat clarifies, that they do not formally support Fedora, but users can turn to a healthy online community to obtain help when they need it.
Dell's (and others) decision on Ubuntu as it's preferred Distribution on Desktops already proves how Canonical and Ubuntu outruns the old "majors".
Better Software? Maybe.
Better business model? For sure.
I'm quite confident that Red Hat will reconsider it's statement in a foreseeable future.
