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HP To Sell And Support Red Hat Linux
Dman33 writes "Redhat Linux seems to be gaining an even stronger share in the server and workstation market as HP is announcing worldwide sales and support of the popular distro. Infoworld has a writeup on the announcement and the press release straight from HP is a good read regarding the initiative."
Of course it is, how could you go wrong with a business model that is 100% profit.
RedHat ISOS - $0
Charging people for CDs - $ profit
Charging people to install OS - $ profit
Charging for support - $ profit
For everything else, theres Windows.
Completely different target customers, at least for the time being.
HP will probably ship linux on it's x86 based servers, but for the various HP3000/9000 etc big-iron servers, it'll still be HP-UX. I sincerely doubt that linux will have the punch that HP-UX carries on a bigass HP9000 N-class server.
Eventuall HP-UX and Tru64 will no doubt follow MPE into the lands of obscurity. Although, there are still a ton of MPE users/customers out there (my company being one of them with a few dozen MPE based sites installed).
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
"HP, in Palo Alto, Calif. , generated about $2 billion in Linux-based revenue in 2002, the company said in Wednesday's statement. "
:) Who said u cannot make money by using linux?
Thats freaking huge
Announcements like this always say "workstations and servers". Don't they think that Linux users want portable devices?
I just want a good quality Linux laptop with firewire, a built-in CDR, lots of RAM, and a power-efficient CPU. I don't want to pay the Windows tax and I don't want an expensive, high speed CPU.
(Why the heck anyone needs a 2 GHz CPU in a laptop is a mystery to me. )
The Lindows "$799" machine would have been perfect but it has no built in CD drive - a fatal deficiency, at least to me.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
This is Red Hat though, a well packaged Linux distribution.
Not (IMHO) a technically good Linux distribution, others are leaner and meaner. But for the corperate environment it's ideal. But I do have concerns about the very short length of the security update subscription provided with Red Hat. Installing apt4rpm provides a way around this in some cases.
HP-UX doesnt run on x86 architecture.
Linux doesnt run (remotely well) on the HP3000/9000 big momma mainframes.
Two different OS's for two different product lines.
The real issue is if this will see HP really pushing linux through its sales channels instead of just being another "we recommend Windows 2000" shill.
Not for what we use it for. Linux is great for smaller servers and development, but we have machines with terabytes and terabytes of data running on super stable hardware that has features the Linux people are just talking about.
Plus, if/when Linux is ready it won't be too hard to switch as most of what we run on these machines is pretty standard, they are moving from PA-RISC to Intel Itanium, and support contracts only last a few years. Either way, HP gets our money.
why would any new customers buy in to HP-UX?
Because they're willing to pay a premium for high performance PA-RISC system with loads of processors. Same market as big Sun and IBM machines. Same market that Linux won't eat yet for a couple of years. But you're right - if price is the determining decision in the purchase, Lintel is The Way to Go.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
This is hardly news at all.
Lindows at Walmart.com was news.
When will I be able to walk into Best Buy or Circuit City or a bricks n mortar Wal-Mart and see laptops and consumer desktops that don't make me want to scream in agony?
That will be news.
mt
How are they providing barriers to entry? They provide all of the source to AS on there ftp site. In fact they provide it in SRPM fasion so you can recompile the entire distro if you like. Your complaining because they don't make available the Binary ISO? What requires them to do this? And why would they want to when it just costs them money?
Hmmm... putting my cynical hat on: RH are certainly looking like they are going to be the dominant Linux flavour in years to come and -maybe- stand the best chance of making the breakthrough onto the desktop. Certainly the company looks set up to be able to get software on servers, on desktops and provide the support that many IT managers would expect from a large software provider.
However, if I look at RH from a financial standpoint, it would be in their economic interest to make sure that when someone starts to deploy Linux around the workplace that it is not so easy to (say) switch to another flavour as you will lose revenue.
I am a big fan of RH but suspect in the years to come, could (ab)use their position in the Linux world in a similar way to another large OS company!
Anyone who had to mess with the wacky 9u Compaq server hardware of a couple of years ago and wanted to run Linux on knows that Compaq (before HP) and RedHat we're holding hands a long time before this announcement. Not kissing or petting, but there was a tacit agreement that Compaq supported the RedHat distros (6.x and 7.x series) and RedHat made sure to roll their SCSI array drivers into the mix. They were good friends, and probably even exchanged a couple of "partner" trinkets over the years.
Before this, Dell was the RedHat "Daddy". That was probably before Michael Dell and Steve Ballmer had a couple of meetings and came to the agreement that Linux was bad for Dell in the "consumer space", which somehow included their laptops, and their website. Anyone remember the "powerapp" boxen. They were good, and came with RH 6.2 and 7.0 distros. That was before "Red the Hat", decided to really mess up their distro.
This latest announcement is a "Stock market Ad" designed to make both HP and RedHat look better than usual (warty beasts with scrabbling claws and pale lidless eyes which cannot withstand the brilliant light of full-disclosure) and to signal that server clients and channel partners can "Have RedHat, we mean Linux, with that".
And after RedHat's 8.x they can eat their distro one mylar shard at a time...I'll be nice and let them choose which end they want it in, because it's never going to see my servers again. Ever.
Every new form of media has it's own Requirimento
Wasn't HP supporting Debian before?
Its far superior...
not to gentoo, but definatly to anything RPM-based
Buttsex.
And we definatly don't need noobies with HP's thinking they can tackle red hat just becuase they can change the properties of a shortcut in windows.
Yes, we do. We also need elitists like you to stop spreading a meme that is helping to prop up Microsoft's desktop dominance. As of RH8, the interface is such that the level of competence required to change the properites of a windows "shortcut" is similar to the level of competence required to be productive with Linux - even more so in consumer-oriented distros such as Mandrake, Lycoris, and Lindows.
As long as people like you help the average joe think that Linux is too 31337 for them, the power base of Microsoft will continue its staying power.
I really would like HP to provide some Linux support for their recent comsumer products like my laptop. Or at leasr release the info so someone can write device drivers. Now THAT would be very Linux-friendly.
...Same market as big Sun and IBM machines. Same market that Linux won't eat yet for a couple of years...
:) supports UNIX. Linux is sort of mostly UNIX, I would think most of us value it's transparent openness over and above it's conformance to standards, but would I want to support it on big iron now? No, it's not ready, there is no hardware vendor support for big iron functionality and the OS scalability isn't even nearly linear over 10+ CPU's. 10-12 CPU's is midrange by any serious UNIX player standards. Let's not start on fibre channel support, or monitoring tool integration, or any of the other many, many missing bits.
Too true (though more than a couple of years I'd say). Most people here don't understand enterprise computing (or they mostly keep quiet). It needs saying again, and again. Linux is not ready. This is not flamebait. It will get there in the end with enough support, but it will require hardware vendor support.
I think everyone here (that matters
Linux will grow up through the enterprise, through small boxes, to medium sized boxes to large boxes (with vendor support). It'll take time and can't be accelerated by 'many eyes' because those many eyes don't have access to the crucial (and innovative) design details which differentiate one big box vendor's product from another big box vendor's product.
# init 5
Connection closed.
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