HP's Debian support added $25 Mil in 2006

greggh · Post by **greggh** » Fri Feb 23, 2007 12:30 am

I thought this story was encouraging... A big vendor supporting and doing pretty well supporting Debian

http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/ar ... hp/3661481

Who said you can't make money by supporting free community-based Linux distributions?

HP is making $25 million by supporting the free Debian GNU/Linux distribution in what may ultimately turn out to be a challenge to commercial distributions from Novell and Red Hat.

HP announced in August 2005 it would be offering support services for Debian, which has been one of the most popular and widest deployed community-based Linux distributions since its inception.GNU/Linux.

In fiscal 2006, $25 million in hardware sales in EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) were directly related to HP's Debian support.

"I was pretty shocked when I found out about this," Jeffrey Wade, worldwide marketing manager of open source and Linux at HP, told internetnews.com.

Wade noted that the sales figures were much greater than his own expectations. Though HP announced support for Debian last August, it was only in December that HP began to sell what it calls Debian care packs of support services. Those care packs are bundled offerings of support from HP for predetermined levels of service and response times.

"When we talked in August we said that we'd be introducing a phased approach," Wade explained. "We're now in phase four of our hardware testing, and we'll be finished by the end of this quarter and then we'll have all ProLiant and Blade System Servers supported by Debian."

HP support is set for the Debian Sarge release, which debuted in June 2005. Wade noted that HP is working toward certifying its hardware against the upcoming Debian Etch release, which is set for a 2007 rollout.

Wade was unable to break out figures beyond EMEA, though he noted the bulk of the Debian-related sales were to SMBs and government customers.

"We're the first major vendor to offer this kind of support for Debian," Wade said, adding that, by backing it, the company is validating it as an alternative to commercially branded Linux distributions for customers.

allix · Post by **allix** » Fri Feb 23, 2007 1:32 pm

thats good news as long as it does not turn Debian into a Ubuntu .

Vogateer · Post by **Vogateer** » Fri Feb 23, 2007 1:36 pm

Looks like that's just support. Dunc-Tanc has already proven a failure, so I doubt anyone will be tinkering with Debian too much anymore.

You have something against Ubuntu, Allix? I don't always agree with them, but they're hardly evil.

allix · Post by **allix** » Fri Feb 23, 2007 1:46 pm

Vogateer wrote:
You have something against Ubuntu, Allix? I don't always agree with them, but they're hardly evil.

I feel something abominable is going to happen at Canonical, i am not suggesting its going to involve Microsoft but perhaps something pretty close.
Also the distro IMO is getting big in the boots for a distro thats relatively new and talks about Freedom so much thats its gears are changing.

With limespire for instance, the distro is outright forthcoming with what plans they have, had ubuntu been the same, i would not dislike them so much.

Vogateer · Post by **Vogateer** » Fri Feb 23, 2007 2:19 pm

I'll not suggest that Canonical is pure as the driven snow, but until I see some actions that I consider immoral, then I'll say with all due respect that your feelings are just that, subjective feelings.

As far as Ubuntu partnering with Linspire, this seems reasonable to me. People who want to have codecs or pay for commercial software, they should be free to do so and Linspire would be a good route to take to get that encumbered software. I do hope that lawsuits like the one I mentioned about Microsoft being sued over MP3 usage and other such threats will be a driving force towards open formats, since unfortunately I don't see Linux desktop usage helping out too much in that respect.

If everyone rallies around an open format, you'll see what you have with SCO, huge names banded together to fight against silly patents or other bad copyright claims so that such attempts will be much more difficult and less likely to be successful and profitable.

allix · Post by **allix** » Fri Feb 23, 2007 5:38 pm

Vogateer wrote:since unfortunately I don't see Linux desktop usage helping out too much in that respect.

The BBC have rethought how there going to provide the media content after a lot of feedback from non-windows users. There was even something official on the website.
http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/news/archive ... e_p_1.html