OSNews

To be fair, businesses are rational in that they understand that customers are not.

The Turbolinux CEO "characterized the deal as a way to help his customers perceive Turbolinux as 'the distribution that works best with their existing Microsoft investments'".

Notice there is no attempt to help his customers understand anything about his product and its relationship with Microsoft products. It's all about perception. It's quite rational to model a market as a set of unconscious desires that must be satisfied by beliefs.

If you do a survey about consumer product preferences or poll on voter interests, you get a completely different picture than the one you get from analyzing consumer behavior or electoral outcomes. People don't buy products or vote for politicians according to their preferences and interests but rather according to their beliefs and emotions.

People can be classified according to what drives their underlying desires. There's the conformer that wants to fit in, the aspirer that wants to be somebody, the succeeder that wants to compete to win, and the reformer that wants to change the world.

I'm a reformer, and I imagine that most people opposed to these cross-licensing deals reject them on the grounds that they represent problems with the patent system rather than the elimination of barriers to Linux adoption.

However, short of reforming a broken patent system, more people would aspire to be a Linux user if it were more interoperable, and more would succeed through using Linux if it were less vulnerable to legal suits. Rational or not, these subtle perceptions are getting in the way of the aspirations and ambitions of prospective customers, and the vendors are conscious of these desires.

Could they be fulfilled through other means such as Red Hat's patent indemnification policy? Yes. But perhaps the executives at Turbolinux, especially given their Asian culture, are conformers, seeking to fit in by mimicking the most prominent response to these problems.