Folks are writing too much into this event.
Project Eonity (Eos for the engineering folks, Unity for everyone else) supposedly worked under the "A given set of requirements is sent out and various vendors bid on them. The winner gets to provide that round of workstations." So this round RHAT wins on software and Dell wins on hardware. If any other vendor can meet the bid requirements and win the bid, they'll probably get it on the next round.
And it isn't particularly surprising that the University finally went with PCs. In 1998 the University had to respond to things such as AutoCAD being available only for WIN32 (And parents complaining "My kid is in computer science, but doesn't have a clue on how to fix my Windows 95 machine when he comes home":-). Toss in a series of Vice Provosts were grooming themselves for corporate jobs and the average idiot bean counter and it becomes a no brainer that a PC based Unix of some flavor would eventually become the standard.
As for the open source claims, I write them off as hype. There are other issues in the area that lead to explanations that are both more plausible and more salient.
Formerly cddukes@eos.ncsu.edu
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Folks are writing too much into this event. Project Eonity (Eos for the engineering folks, Unity for everyone else) supposedly worked under the "A given set of requirements is sent out and various vendors bid on them. The winner gets to provide that round of workstations." So this round RHAT wins on software and Dell wins on hardware. If any other vendor can meet the bid requirements and win the bid, they'll probably get it on the next round. And it isn't particularly surprising that the University finally went with PCs. In 1998 the University had to respond to things such as AutoCAD being available only for WIN32 (And parents complaining "My kid is in computer science, but doesn't have a clue on how to fix my Windows 95 machine when he comes home" :-). Toss in a series of Vice Provosts were grooming themselves for corporate jobs and the average idiot bean counter and it becomes a no brainer that a PC based Unix of some flavor would eventually become the standard.
As for the open source claims, I write them off as hype. There are other issues in the area that lead to explanations that are both more plausible and more salient.
Formerly cddukes@eos.ncsu.edu