My Errant Mind

Computer manufacturer and services company HP made a big discovery after announcing in 2005 that it would provide support services to the Debian Gnu/Linux distro. The discovery was $25 million in hardware sales directly attributable to their support of the community-based and built distro at the end of 2006.

And, that was just in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Even HP’s worldwide marketing manager of open source and Linux, Jeffrey Wade, was shocked.

The full article can be found on Internetnews.com’s website:
http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3661481

A Major Vendor Providing Support Is Great, But…

HP is the first major vendor fully supporting Debian and I’m glad to see it. It’s my personal Linux distro of choice and despite not having some of the sugar-coated, high-gloss that other distros have, I can always count on it. Rock-solid comes to mind as a good descriptor of Debian’s performance and reliability. Now, with a major player in the PC market providing services for it, competitors should be looking over their shoulders.

Red Hat, and Novel’s SUSE distros are both also supported by HP—which is good and bad. It means good things for users of those particular distros, but I for one have concerns about overlap. Now that Microsoft has its hands in Novel’s pockets, I don’t want to see HP providing support to SUSE and Debian both. As Debian is an open community project, I worry that HP’s support may begin to influence developers. The scary thing would be if HP requires the distros it supports to suddenly do something to appease Microsoft, which runs on so many HP boxes.

I definitely don’t want to see that.

Open Source Shows It Is A Viable Business Foundation

Still, it is good news to hear HP has found Linux so profitable. I have been advocating open source for years as a solid business foundation, and we are starting to see that play out.

People just need to find the right model to take advantage of open source, and—of course—we need more technology evangelists coming out of universities instead of graduates who have been training on proprietary platforms because large companies have funded their computer labs.

[Note: Check out Guy Kawasaki's blog, How To Change The World, to read up on technology evangelism. His blog is a shining beacon for the inspired evangelist.]

Curiously, IBM Is Also Looking At Debian

While researching, I found that IBM has also come on board the Debian support services bandwagon. They partnered with French company Alcôve to provide Debian support for their IBM Global Linux Support Line.

Debian is making great strides with the Debian Common Core Alliance (DCC Alliance) which will help various distros based on Debian maintain a common code base that is in compliance with the Linux Standards Base that is maintained by The Linux Foundation. This is making Debian more and more attractive to the enterprise and is one of the best moves Debian has made to invigorate itself.

Debian And GNU/Linux For The World

I am looking forward to the next couple of years with Debian. I think we will see major strides for the enterprise, and that will only strengthen Debian for the average home user.

Linux as a whole is making great strides. South Africa recently announced it is switching to open source software. South Africa is also the home of Ubuntu Linux, which is based on Debian. More governments are following suit. India sees Linux as the solution for educating more than half a million children, something, which is something I wrote about in a research paper more than a year ago.

Developing nations will increasingly turn to open source as a solution to avoid costly licensing of more expensive operating systems. Those of us in highly developed nations that embrace open source will be the ones bridging the divide and greeting them with open arms. We will help shape technology the way the world wants to see it done—not how a group of sloppy coders working for one software giant thinks it should be.

Like HP, we will find that open source pays.