HP Pushes Open Source For Small Businesses

ruphus13 writes "HP finally begins to actively push open source in its products. From the post, 'HP has been quirky over the years when it comes to open source. It has been, traditionally, a company that supports open source — especially in larger enterprises... Wednesday, it announced two new open source products, geared to small businesses and educational institutions. HP plans on including its 'Mozilla Firefox for HP Virtual Solution' on more of its business class desktop PCs (to a total of seven models between the HP Compaq dc/dx lines in the US, eight models worldwide). Come December 15th, HP will also offer Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop on its HP Compaq dc5850 model. The base SLED-equipped model will cost $519, and features the usual open source suspects for the small business setting — OpenOffice, and mail clients such as Evolution.'"

Comments

A few thoughts...

[nagnamer]

First of all, I wonder if "HP recommends Windows Vista® Business" (c/p from the product's description on HP's site) will go away when Linux offering is finally presented.

Also, I wonder if the Linux OS will be labeled "Genuine Novell(r) SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop(tm)" or just "Novell(r) SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop(tm)". Imagine the following scenario: an unsuspecting consumer comes to the website, sees a bunch of "genuine" Windows products, and then notices a (non-genuine, huh?) Linux-something desktop and goes "Wtf? Why is this not genuine?!"... That'd be M$: 1, Novell: 0...

Yeah, I'm skeptical... They all say they support open-source and free software, whatever. But I think they are just trying to get whatever piece of market they can.

Remember how the Punk movement started off as an attempt to contradict the system, and now it's highly commercialized. You can earn a good buck for pre-torn pair of jeans, and you can sell a circle-A leather jacket... people used to make these things by themselves to make a statement. Now you can get off-the-shelf statements for money. I think it's gonna be the same for open-source. In the end, it's all about money, and they don't care about the underlying philosophies. Consumers don't.