So I'm going to break ranks and get involved in this discussion. Someone will probably yell at me, but my first allegiance is to open source, so I'll take my chances.
In case you're wondering, I'm the product manager for this Secure Linux offering, so if you have questions, fire away. But in the meantime...
It's really surprising that so few hardware manufacturers have their own Linux distributions. At least to me it would really just make sense for a hardware company to tailor a version of Linux (or maybe *BSD) to their own hardware and sell it pre installed.
You're right, the appliance play is a strong one with customers. As much as the average ISP loves the technology, there just isn't time to roll your own anymore (thanks very much to the "new" economy). If I want a mail server, it's a lot easier for me to grab someone's black box -- as long as I can trust it -- than to do it myself. Same for other utility boxes: FTP, DNS, NNM, "insert-daemon-of-the-day-here".
It's a lot easier for vendors like HP to build it on our own box, because our customers _always_ want SLAs that guarantee uptime and security and such. But we can't get stuck on one box, and the HP offering recognizes that. We pretty much have to have some site security surveys before we're willing to make promises and support a customer putting this on the wire. It's kindof like checking the other guy's rope before you agree to anchor his climb -- you're half of this partnership, and you need to look out for your customers.
Sure, we may sell some hardware in the process, but that isn't why we did this. We did it 'cause it was the right thing to do, because we had some cool ideas about how multi-level security would fit into Linux and maybe add some value -- ideas so big that we couldn't _not_ do turn them into code.
Oh, by the way, I would love to tell my friends that my team started a new Linux distro, and I appreciate the credit, but it isn't really intended to usurp like that. We'd like to get the code into the kernel and let it be a part of all distros -- but, as always, it's up to the community to christen it, not us.
"There's nothing truer than the truth." --Wear family motto
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In case you're wondering, I'm the product manager for this Secure Linux offering, so if you have questions, fire away. But in the meantime...
It's really surprising that so few hardware manufacturers have their own Linux distributions. At least to me it would really just make sense for a hardware company to tailor a version of Linux (or maybe *BSD) to their own hardware and sell it pre installed.
You're right, the appliance play is a strong one with customers. As much as the average ISP loves the technology, there just isn't time to roll your own anymore (thanks very much to the "new" economy). If I want a mail server, it's a lot easier for me to grab someone's black box -- as long as I can trust it -- than to do it myself. Same for other utility boxes: FTP, DNS, NNM, "insert-daemon-of-the-day-here".
It's a lot easier for vendors like HP to build it on our own box, because our customers _always_ want SLAs that guarantee uptime and security and such. But we can't get stuck on one box, and the HP offering recognizes that. We pretty much have to have some site security surveys before we're willing to make promises and support a customer putting this on the wire. It's kindof like checking the other guy's rope before you agree to anchor his climb -- you're half of this partnership, and you need to look out for your customers.
Sure, we may sell some hardware in the process, but that isn't why we did this. We did it 'cause it was the right thing to do, because we had some cool ideas about how multi-level security would fit into Linux and maybe add some value -- ideas so big that we couldn't _not_ do turn them into code.
Oh, by the way, I would love to tell my friends that my team started a new Linux distro, and I appreciate the credit, but it isn't really intended to usurp like that. We'd like to get the code into the kernel and let it be a part of all distros -- but, as always, it's up to the community to christen it, not us.
"There's nothing truer than the truth." --Wear family motto