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RedHat, Fujitsu Enter Into Marketing Agreement
andyring writes "According to Cnet, RedHat and Fujitsu signed a partership agreement where the companies will jointly develop and market for Fujitsu's products. Fujitsu hs a strong presence in Asia, a place Microsoft has been trying to cultivate."
Used to be when you bought floppy disks, sometimes you could get a bonus floppy disk that had a MS entertainment pack on it.
:)
Imagine all hard disks coming preloaded with a self-configuring Linux distro. That would be cool.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Fujitsu has made some really decent high-end equipment, scanners and data storage equipment. Seems only natural to partner with Linux, who's becoming King of the datastore.
I've had nothing but trouble getting linux to work on the three fujitsu laptops that I've owned.
But, at the same time, maybe this means we'll be able to buy laptops with linux pre-installed again, which would be a wonderful wonderful thing.
Maybe I'll have to consider fujitsu laptops again, so long as they're not still twice the price of an equivalent Compaq...
A side effect of this could well be to reduce the variability of hardware and drivers - if only because the lack of specific drivers makes linux less forgiving of random throwing together of components. They'll HAVE to try harder if they want it to work.
Paul "Say no to feeping creaturism"
Microsoft will never expand very well into Asia, they will be stopped by these people first. http://www.samuraiwar.com/page.php?x=2166 Microsoft's main consumer base is because they have no other option they are familiar with. In asia it's the opposite. Microsoft is Linux (The new Guy) and the Asian OSs are Microsoft. Oh my god... did I just say Microsoft was Linux?! Forgive me Linus! Forgive me! *Cuts his wrists*
The post says "Fujitsu hs a strong presence in Asia, a place Microsoft has been trying to cultivate."
;-)
The article states "While Fujitsu lacks those competitors' market share, it does have a strong position in Asia, where Red Hat is trying to expand."
The article doesn't mention Microsoft.
Looks like someone woke up hating Microsoft today. (I know. This is shashdot. What do I expect?). This just strikes me as unneeded FUD generating bullshit. Of course, I'm a little grumpy myself. I need more coffee.
What? Companies want to sell software? In other news, the sky is blue, the sun is hot, and sex is enjoyable.
I know this post is against slashdot custom. It doesn't bash microsoft, and it implies that a slashdot member has gone outdoors and has even *gasp!* actually had sex!
"Give a woman two glasses of wine and some pad thai, and they'll agree to just about anything." the Sports Guy
This is the more interesting part of the story. Fujitsu are going to pay for some engineers to work at RedHat offices, improving "performance, stability and the ability to run on large servers with heavy processing loads."
I am very encouraged by the number of companies prepared to take this step, bearing in mind that the GPL forces them to make the changes available for everyone.
I've long been puzzled as to why a company should pay for improvements to a system, if they then have to make these available to their competitors. I think perhaps there are two reasons. First, Linux is not Windows. Making Linux a better competitor to Windows helps Fujitsu more than they are hurt by having to give code away.
Secondly, companies focus on their own area. A company that makes, for example, 8-way AMD servers would focus on that area. Their competitors would have access to the code for running well on 8-way AMD servers, but if they don't make them it doesn't help.
I like what RedHat did - and what Fujitsu did even more. Looks like buyers of Fujitsu servers can expect good hardware support on Linux-based systems. I'm impressed that Fujitsu hired RedHat to do the work, and I'm equally impressed that RedHat had the brains to seek out a new revenue source.
I'm not sure this article has much to do with the SCO situation though.
-- $G
this is true, however, anyone running red hat who installed with kde 3.0 and wants to update to kde 3.1 may as well re install red hat 9.0...lord knows that that is easier than trying to get kde 3.0 out and compiling and installing 3.1 (or doing it from rpm) trust me, ports makes life much easier
Here is a news release to announce that they will update server line-up with new SPARC compatible 1.35 GHz CPU in an attempt to take back No1 spot of TPC-C benchmark.
Fujitsu's CEO Mr. Akikusa has recently predicted that every chip will finally implement Linux.
The bad thing is Fujitsu is another Japanese company struggling to come back to be profitable.
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They could sell far more if they allowed you to purchase them without Microsoft products on them. It would be great if this new partnership allowed them to experiment with selling machines with RedHat preinstalled.
"First you get the Linux, then you get the power, THEN you get the women"
1. Providing RHCE certfication exams, and certs.
Which is great, because IT graduates here are crazy about things like that.
Poor or no mirrors for downloading distros.
Doesn't make much of a difference, considering the bandwidth situation and that the primary method of distribution is CDs.
Little or no support offerings for their products.
Well, people don't even pay MS (though that's changing recently), how do you expect them to pay RH??
Few relationshipd with h/w vendors that matter in Asia.
This is the thing that matters most. Which is why I'm very happy about this move.
Often one gets the impression that all Japanese (mega) corporations are all alike, the monster grade zaibatsu of cyberpunk litterature. Even Western financial companies gets this wrong; I have gotten badly """researched""" prospectus from my bank on investing in Japan and have seen this many other places.
That is not quite the case.
Up to WWII zaibatsu (no plural "S" in Japanese...) were a damper on initiative; many thought that if X was a good idea the zaibatsu would have been doing it already; hence it had to be a bad idea. Enter the US, opening the country with the subtlety on a can-opener. One of the things they succeeded in for a long while was to break up the zaibatsu as an anti trust measure and then you got the right ecology for the new generation fast acting, innovative companies like Sony and Fujitsu.
OK, so the parts of the zaibatsu merged, terminator 2 style (though with more subtlety) and they are more or less back...
Anyway, Fujitsu is and remains a company that wants to cultivate innovation and actually goes so far as to say they want people outside the concensus-building norm of Japan. They have openings for foreigners and in spite of current financial climate might very well be an opportunity for sending in a job application to for non-Japanese.
So seeing them wanting to enter the world of Linux, deep end, is then no surprise.
Linux is starting to suffer a fate that I feared was coming for a long time. It's no longer cool.
It was, for a time, cool to run Linux because it was the only fully POSIX (depending on how rigorous your POSIX definition was) OS for home computers that had all of the usual bells and whistles (X, GNU tools, etc) that also had freely available source.
386BSD came along at about the same time, but was really only usable a bit after Linux so Linux got a bit of a mind-share head start (otherwise we'd all be running one of the BSDs by now).
Today, progress on Mach still continues under Darwin; HURD is moving to a new Microkernel that's much smaller and "hipper"; Open/NetBSD have adopted a very promising new VM model; and worst of all (in terms of Linux's geek appeal) Linux is a massive corporate success in dozens of large niches.
This is a huge win for the Free Software cause, but for Linux it means that the now super-broad OS is starting to show its faults. There are very few people who currently seem to be thinking about the big picture in terms of how the whole OS works in any given incarnation. Worse, the hack-value of making the bettter diver for hardware XYZ has reduced significantly, and most of the kernel work I see happening is not on tuning older drivers for new versions so much as incorporating brand new and interesting hardware, or working on kernel-wide systems like VM, security or scheduling
Red Hat's partnership with hardware companies like Fujitsu (maker of laptops, hard drives and more) is excellent because it brings the hardware vendors to the table to pick up some of that slack and frees Red Hat developers to focus on the big picture. Much as they've taken heat for it, RH has done a lot of good in thinking of the dekstop as a whole rather than as a potential spot to plug in vendors A, B or C (or should I say G, K or W). What they need to do now is keep moving down the chain. Standardize all of the system documentation on ONE format and convert everything to it (personally, I recommend a modified POD, which is what Perl uses, and could easily be modified to produce useful texi and Gnome SGML, while it already produces man, text and HTML). IMHO "man foo" and "info foo" and bringing up the Gnome help viewer should all give access in one, consistent (though UI-distinct) way with the same, complete documentation. Why isn't that the case? Because no one has time to work at that level (Kudos to the LFS people for taking up my challenge on that point last week, and starting to work on a port of the OpenBSD man pages to the Linux tools!)