Whenever someone announces an abnormally good initiative, there are also voices yelling about conspiracies and hidden reasons. Thus, it was only natural for it to happen to Dell too. Not long ago, Dell announced they will start selling desktops and notebooks with pre-installed Ubuntu Linux as operating system. Instead of sustaining this marvelous initiative, some started wondering: Why on earth would Dell do something like this? Why would Dell help the open source community by pushing Linux on the market?

All kinds of paranoid questions and presumptions were spread around different Linux-related forums and now I've noticed that even news channels started to give some importance to these type of conceptions. The latest aberration I've heard was that Dell might actually impede the open source development through this initiative, due to some limits imposed for the Ubuntu pre-installed computers.

Let me enlighten a bit all those who gave it credit. Dell is no part of any malefic conspiracy against the open source community, and it does not limit exclusively the Ubuntu Linux computers sales. The limitation thing is part of the company's policy and it works for any other product in the Home & Home Office Category, as it is claimed on their website too.

The 5 at once systems per customer limit might come as being related to the capacity production and the delivering term. I think Dell knows better how much the systems' shipping takes and that the 5 at once limit was not randomly chosen. It is not the first company in the world imposing limits on the number of products that can be shipped at once. This practice is quite frequent, many companies offering also alternatives to this, such as the negotiation of the delivery term for a bigger order. I hope this time it was loud and clear enough for anyone to understand, and next time I'll hear these kind of slanders, they'd better have some reasonable grounds.