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Red Hat, IBM Expand Linux Deal

Posted by Hemos on from the growing-out-the-bidness dept.

jukal writes "From ZDNet "Red Hat and IBM have expanded a partnership, with Red Hat bringing its top-end version of Linux to all four of IBM's server lines and with IBM's services and software divisions supporting Red Hat's software. "" The NYTimes also has a version of the story, as does the News-Observer.

6 of 140 comments (clear)

  1. Quite pleased! by Jeppe+Salvesen · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I am quite pleased. As more and more open source project become so mature they can be run in a large corporation, the need to run on big iron emerges. This is the kind of deal that will enable Linux to nicely scale further into the corporate everyday life.

    --

    Stop the brainwash

  2. Re:Red Hat? by tanveer1979 · · Score: 4, Interesting
    "Red Hat is the Microsoft of the Linux world."

    Shouldnt we stop it. Just because somebody is successful, we cannot make it M$ of linux world. Ask yourself this

    • Does Redhat violate GPL
    • Do they refuse to divulge source code
    • Do they steal code and then commercialize it?
    Agreed RPMS are common but whats wrong. People who want tar gz always get it, its all there. Just because something makes things for lesser mortals easier does not mean that it is EVIL. User freindly does not EQUATE with evil , neither does sucess, the sooner people learn it the better
    --
    My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
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  3. The Upside and Downside of the IBM Deal by hillct · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It has always seemed to me that there is more money to be made in services than RedHat has ever been able to squeeze out of them. Every hardware manufacturer of any significant size derives large percentages of their revenues from their Global Services (enterprise consulting) divisions so why couldn't Redhat manage it? IBM seems to think they can do it bu supporting and integrating the same products redhat was.

    Perhaps the key is that the hardware manufacturers are offering the services as a value added feature of their core products. This raises the question, why did VA Systems abandon Linux based PC hardware in favor of becoming a software shop, and at that, not even one that provides Linux software integration consulting? Well, in the case of VA it was probably due to their content holdings, but again, if the combination of hardware sales and software integration services can work for IBM, why wouldn't it work for Redhat or (in the past) VA? It just seems to me that, while having IBM enter what is esentially a reseller agreement, is not the most lucrative means for generating a revenue stream from Redhat's distribution; although it does have vary low overhead, which is parhaps a key for redhat at this point.

    --CTH

    --

    --Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
    1. Re:The Upside and Downside of the IBM Deal by duffbeer703 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      IBM Global Services does "Best of Breed" consulting. They push whatever will do the job (and get comissions for the salesmen). If you want Sun, IBM will sell you Sun. If you think RS/6000's and DB2 are shit, they'll sell you Windows 2000 and Oracle.

      Red Hat and VA is/was a Linux-focused company. Nobody is interested in having an evangelist/salesman push Linux as a solution to all problems. With the IBM deal, RedHat gets to sell services to a more diversified group of companies.

      Also consider that it is time-consuming and difficult to get on government acquisition contracts. IBM is on all state contracts and most federal agency contracts. So through IBM, RedHat can access the massive gov't IT market without getting on contract!

      --
      Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
  4. Re:the trickle effect of anti-trust? by mrjohnson · · Score: 2, Interesting

    > The Linux "collective" needs to start making Linux less configurable (yes I said LESS) for the average user. The average user just doesn't care about all the configurability of Linux... heck, I'm a slightly above average user and I don't care!!! When the learning curve is less steep for Linux, or when somebody offers a distro (Lycoris?) that has less of a learning curve (a sort of Linux Home edition), then Linux will make some major inroads into the home.

    Hell no! :-)

    Let me tell you, there's an older lady at my company who'll be retiring in a couple of days. I once mentioned Linux while I was working on her computer and she bubbled right up. Seems that she once used KDE at another company... and loved it.

    Now, she doesn't know the first thing about her computer. She's one of those users that needs help to install a comet cursor, but she did love Linux because she could change everything about it. (She happens to be quite fond of changing themes and backgrounds.)

  5. IBM and Lexmark by oddbudman · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Lexmark is a somewhat owned by IBM. I still can't get my printer to go under Gentoo as the only drivers that come for the printer are RPM based binaries (rely on LPD not CUPS). My point is that we don't want a situation where many manufactures claim linux support when they only really provide RPM based distro support- I never knew a tgz and a detailed readme were so hard to organise! Clearly from my interactions with Lexmark they seem to not take RPM based distros very seriously, and, as lexmark has close ties with IBM, could this be a sign of things to come with other hardware manufacturers? Is the CUPS standard really all that hard to keep up with?