HP+Compaq Deal Could be Great for Linux

elliotj writes "This Business Week editorial is arguing that the HP purchase of Compaq could mean big things for Linux as the resulting monolith is forced to rationalize their multitude of operating systems. The most sensible solution may well be for them to abandon HPUX, Tru64 et al and embrace Linux as the one-and-only *nix OS. Interesting thing about the article is that it comes from Business Week...not exactly a traditional penguin cheerleader." Ah, but soon, thanks to Yet Another Corporate Merger, we'll have another defunt company icon in the topics field.

Comments

Re:The Drawback of Linux acceptance

[Benley]

... or imagine what could happen if all of a sudden a large wave of 60-year-old Unix gurus were unleashed as Linux developers instead of HP-UX or Tru-64 developers.

Very Good things may happen if Hewlett Paqard keeps their OS fellows around and turns them towards the new unified OS front.

HP not far behind IBM

[Pinball Wizard]

...abandon HPUX, Tru64 et al and embrace Linux as the one-and-only *nix OS.

And supposedly IBM will do this as well, along with making AIX "100% Linux compatible". Trouble is, I've been hearing this for years - and AIX still ships without a C compiler and behaves erratically when you try to install GCC, Perl, etc from anything other than pre-compiled binaries. And where is SMIT for Linux? I'm having a hard time finding evidence of IBM's billion dollar commitment.

It would be a great move for all these companies to get behind Linux - maybe Sun will go the same way if it finally happens. It would be awfully nice to use the same tools to admin RS/6000s as you do to HP or Sun servers, not to mention your Intel boxes at home. Trouble is, all we've seen yet is lip service paid to Linux.

So HP, if you're listening, hopefully you won't drag your feet like IBM has. You're not that far behind, because so far IBM has done very little.

Worse than it looks

[CptnKirk]

HP, who's stock has fallen to about a third of what it was a year ago, still isn't seeing any light. It just bought Compaq for what was $25 Billion in stock. Well since then the stock price has gone from around $23/share to a little over $17/share. This now puts the deal worth at around $18.5 Billion. Still a huge amount of money, but going down rapidly. Investors are asking themselves the same questions that are being asked here. What is the new game plan? Make Linux their heart and soul? Kill off the Linux and HPUX divisions? We all know there will be major layoffs. There just isn't a lot of room for making huge profits in the desktop PC market. Even less I think they'll find in the free OS market.

Now don't get me wrong, I love Linux, Open Source and the like as much as the next guy, however if I had money in HP or Compaq I'd sure hope they'd ditch some of these projects. Right now they need to concentrate on what will bring in the most money the fastest. That's PCs with Windows, peripherals and their scientific equipment (which has huge mark-ups). Supporting Linux at this time IMHO is not the best use of their limited resources. They need to have clear goals (one, maybe two things), and strive to meet them. Being big is not enough.

And speaking of big. A lot is being said about HP now being number 2 behind IBM. As much as people might hope that this makes HP a threat, I just don't think so. IBM has remained pretty strong over this past year. It has a many diverse products, most of which are doing fairly well. With the time it takes HP to work out all the details of this merger and get to facing those goals IBM will have been going strong for another 3-6 months. In the mean time it will be able to corner the Linux desktop market (another reason for HP to bail).

And all this is fine with IBM. IBM is happy to support Linux because it's a sound strategy. Linux works like their mainframe OSs (well much more so than Windows does). IBM develops a lot of software to run on their "big iron", but people and companies are moving away from big machines and onto smaller servers and work stations. For this Linux is a sound choice for IBM. They don't have to spend a lot of money to port their OS to a PC architecure, it's more or less been done for them. Any enhancements they might make to help their Apps can be made through Open Source projects. JFS, Java devel, kernel devel have all come out of IBM. Not because they're being nice, but because it helps their database or some other high price App. run better. This is very sound business and has worked very well for them. I'm sure they'll continue to support Linux, as well as produce desktop PCs that compete with HP. However they have a much more sound business model, they have much more money, and when it's all said and done, I don't think they have much to worry about from HP's latest merger.

consequences? I can think of a few

[StandardDeviant]

"imagine what could happen if all of a sudden a large wave of 60-year-old Unix gurus were unleashed as Linux developers"

• TECO debs and rpms are made (if this has already happened, I don't want to know).
• Someone publishes a .bashrc to give you that nice home-y ITS feel.
• Thinkg**k comes out with an "emacs is for punks" shirt.
• A Multics kernel personality (written in APL with a FORTRAN 66 I/O layer) is submitted with a reminder to Alan and Linus that they were soiling diapers when the author was rebeading core.
• Somebody adds a "KILL SYSTEM" command to one or more shells.
• Somebody writes a kernel module to accept input (through serial I'd guess, not that I'm advocating this) from handmade front panel switches...
• ... and somebody else modifies LILO/GRUB/GAG to accept input from them ...
• ... and somebody else publishes a HOWTO on how to do away with LILO (...) if you have the front toggles ...
• ... and the second author's name is Mel.
• Someone mails Alan or Linus a kernel patch ... on paper tape.
• Two words: PDP port. (tech sidenote: yeah yeah, I know)
• Termcap gets an entry for "asr33".
• Somebody hits Tannenbaum (sp? cue old mono vs. micro kernel thread reference) over the head with a walker.
• Joining Isoslack and Zipslack is ... TapeSlack.
• Someone does a photomontage of their naked, full moon ass and part of the kernel source and mails it to AT&T's corporate headquarters.
• Linux becomes able to boot straight to SpaceWar using the framebuffer modules.
• The man page for ed(1) gets updated.
• Someone posts a flame about how directories are bloat. (no, not like LDAP)
• Multics or ITS joins the ranks of supported VMware guest operating systems.
• When you grovel around in /proc periodically the kernel gives you sage advice like "All Hardware Sucks."

A coat? In Texas? Are you insane?