Hewlett-Packard is to expand support offerings to
customers who run the Debian Project's version of Linux in an
effort to cater to vertical markets and customers who want
customised applications that require changes to the
kernel.
"HP Services is working on some projects right now to increase
the number and quality of the support offerings that they can
provide to customers who want to run Debian," said HP Linux chief
technology officer Bdale Garbee.
The Debian Project is an association of programmers who have
banded together to develop a non-commercial operating system. The
operating system is based on the Linux kernel and also incorporates
basic software tools from another free-software project, the GNU
Project, and is called the Debian GNU/Linux, or Debian for short.
Garbee was the project leader for Debian until early this year.
HP supports a number of commercial versions of Linux including
those from Red Hat and SuSE Linux. In 2001, however, HP
standardised on Debian as its internal Linux research and
development environment.
Up to now, HP has offered support for Debian, but it is on
request only and the service is limited. The decision to enhance
Debian support is being driven not by any philosophical bias but
because the number of customers who want to run Debian on their
systems is growing dramatically.
A number of government and education projects in Spain and
Brazil, for example, are deploying Debian desktops. "In Spain, the
local developers have decided to base their work on Debian, and if
HP wants to be relevant to them as a provider of hardware and
services, we have to be able to say yes to Debian," said
Garbee.
In developing countries where there is a strong sense of Linux
deployments being associated with social work or governmental,
cultural, and educational opportunities, the users and developers
seem more likely to focus on the fundamental ideas of free
software, according to Garbee.
"When they cross the chasm to the new [free software] paradigm,
they start thinking of how to fully participate in the community
development model, and at that point they don't think so much of
commercial distributions of Linux, and focus instead on pure open
source and free software, and they see Debian as being a
distribution that is well aligned with that," Garbee added.
HP's decision to put more resources into Debian support is also
linked to its plans to introduce new products around Debian for
specific vertical markets, such as telecommunications and certain
types of clustered computing environments requiring custom OS
kernel work.
"Once we decide to do custom kernel work to support customers,
that immediately takes us away from commercial distributions [of
Linux], because the branding and the certification that is part of
the branding process for those distributions breaks if you need to
run a different kernel," said Garbee.
An option for HP was to approach a commercial distributor for
the kernel changes, convince the distributor that the market
opportunity justified the modifications, and hope for the
distributor's approval. In such a situation, the schedule for the
changes would also be tied in to the release schedule of the
commercial distributor.
So now, in cases where HP does a custom kernel change and
assumes responsibility for supporting the resulting product, it
will work with Debian. "We prefer to do this with Debian rather
than with, say, Red Hat or SuSE because there is no point in giving
them the money for the distribution, if we are going to be the ones
to support it," Garbee added.
HP will use the support infrastructure it is building for its
new products built around Debian to meet increasing general demand
for the software. "Once we start delivering the products, we have
to staff up and train people to be able to support those systems,"
said Garbee. "It is very easy to have those same people support
more general users of Debian."
However, HP's general marketing focus for Linux will continue to
be on systems running Linux from its commercial distribution
partners.
"The right way to think about this is that HP supports Debian,
but HP does not really market Debian, because there is no financial
advantage for us from doing that," said Garbee.
"We have strong business relationships with our commercial
distribution partners, and we would like to continue to go ahead
with that where it makes good sense to the customer, to HP, and the
commercial distributor, because it provides sharing of the workload
and of the expense of meeting the customer's needs."
John Ribeiro writes for IDG News Service