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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."
There are far too many customers using HP-UX to shut it down, but if they are supplying Linux on-the-cheap, why would any new customers buy in to HP-UX?
Sounds like "pi*sing in the company soup"
"As a writer / novelist you might want to spellcheck your sig.
Speaking from personal experience, my CEO is relucant to approve software with no point of support. The more support open source gets, the easier it makes my job of trying to convince him to move to more open source software.
The question is when I walk into CompUSA, Circuit City, and all those other consumer heavens of electronics.. will I see a HP workstation running RedHat?
Or will it just be an obscure option burried in their website?
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Free your mind.
I'm a little concerned that this may lead to no x86-64 (Opteron, Althon64) support from RedHat. :(
:(
... is yours?
HP co-owns the IP for Itanium with Intel, so they have a vested interest in seeing Itanium get lots of support, and AMD x86-64 get none. RedHat has already announced Itanium versions of Advanced Server, but AFAIK, has been silent on the x86-64 front.
SuSE has announced long ago that they'd release x86-64 versions of their distro to coincide with Opteron's release, and they seem to be actively involved with that process.
Am I being paranoid here? Or does it look like RH might not support the most cost-effective 64bit platform going? Not all of us have deep pockets for I2.
Don
my smug mug is on smugmug
my smug mug is on smugmug
An HP/Red Hat support partnership is sort of no big deal. It's great to see, but not a surprise.
What left me semi-stunned (until I regained my natural skepticism) was the following sentence:
Today's announcement builds on our $2 billion in Linux-based revenue in 2002 and our decade of commitment to the open source and Linux communities," said Peter Blackmore, executive vice president, HP Enterprise Systems Group. (emphasis mine.)
Where the heck does HP get this figure from? (And if VA Linux couldn't make it in the Linux hardware biz, how come HP is making $2 billion revenues just a couple years later?)
"Sniff test" problems here... but I wouldn't mind being enlightened by someone from HP.
--LP
Answer: cheap R&D. HP can leave the development to someone else and focus its efforts on sales. HP is sure to have RedHat's ear when it wants it too. You have to figure that they see the writing on the wall: open source can do what the big boys do and sometimes can do it better. This move helps preserve their hardware sales a la Apple with OSX. Smart. Selling software anymore seems like selling ice to eskimos.
Where the heck does HP get this figure from?
ISTR HP snagged a huge Linux deal at Dreamworks last year. And they also scored a big Linux deal at Disney.
The entertainment industry (especially the movie industry) are ironically moving to Linux big-time. The visual effects industry essentially told all their tools suppliers to port to Linux or else. The tools vendors have complied. Expect to see tasks that were traditionally done on SGI or Sun machines to be done pretty much exclusively on Linux machines from now on.
James Cameron pretty much set the tone for Linux in Hollywood with the renderfarm he used for Titanic. That farm was built with Digital Alpha processors, but instead of buying DEC Unix (or Tru64 or whatever it was called then), his effects guys put Linux on the machines and saved a couple of hundred grand.
I find it endlessly amusing that Hollywood is so staunchly in support of intellectual property rights, but is more than willing to enjoy the benefits of Linux.