HP seems to have a liking for big deals - remember when they spent $25 billion for Compaq? Now they're laying out almost $14 billion to acquire global services company EDS. When elephants go dancing together, the rest of us need to be cautious.
Whatever HP intends to get out of this deal (our parent site GigaOm interprets it as an investment in a cloud future), we look at it from a different point of view: what does it mean to open source?
Like most large companies, both HP and EDS have dabbled in open source. HP actually has a well-organized presentation of its open source efforts available. These include:
- Substantial sales (over $10 billion to date) of Linux servers
- Over a thousand supported open-source printer drivers
- Indemnification for customers against legal action by SCO
- Common criteria security certification for a variety of hardware/software Linux combos
- A variety of support offerings
EDS, by contrast, has much less invested in open source than HP. While mentions of open source do turn up from time to time in the EDS blogs, the company has no page on its site listing open source offerings. And in the past, EDS executives have been notably unfriendly to Linux. And no wonder: Microsoft is a part of the group of select partners in the EDS Agility Alliance, participating in major EDS deals and supplying the standard platform for many of EDS' efforts.While EDS is obviously familiar with open source, it seems to be more interested in steering its customers to closed source "enterprisey" products.
In the short run, this will be like any other big merger: existing open source and commercial offerings will remain much as they are now. Over the long run, much will depend on how independent EDS, operating as "EDS - an HP company", is from the rest of the corporation. Clearly they'll start selling HP servers into their accounts. But the result of the inevitable culture wars inside the company will determine the operating system on those servers. With HP apparently buying EDS to bring an existing line of money-making business into the mix, we hope we'll see HP shipping more Linux - but fear the result will be more Windows instead.
What do you think the HP/EDS deal means for open source?
Comments
Add CommentBy an anonymous user on May. 15, 2008
I'm and EDS employee, and I hope that this merger will mean more of an embrace of open source. The only Linux distros that EDS will currently allow are Red Hat and SUSE. This is because of the premium vendor support that is available. I would hope that eventually Ubuntu will be on that list.
By Al War Ming on May. 22, 2008
Ref: Previous comment by anonymous : Ubuntu for servers ???!!!! Seriously, is that the understanding of a data center that some so called technologists have ?
Datacenter has 3 or 4 segments.
* (Super)High Availability (HA) & fault tolerance satisfied by Mainframes, NonStop, Stratus. Really mission/business critical (probably proprietary) applications sit here. This is a really narrow segment and only big corps can afford them. The necessary but low volumes keep the price high.
* High Availability(HA), Scalability, 24x7 Support and extreme performance - Enterprise class Unix such as HP-UX/AIX. Oracle/Ingres/SAP would sit here.
* Cheap, widely available commodity x86 servers running Linux/Windows. Everything else runs here. The Linux distros which bundle Linux for servers are welcome here. Fedora and the likes are shown the door to the desktop world. Seriously, I still fret at thought of handing over my datacenter to people who want to run Ubuntu on the servers. (Nothing against the raw, perhaps on deathbed, server edition of Ubuntu, but the technologists who like to scratch their back with a gun. However Ubuntu for desktop rocks!).
* An in-between segment using Linux/windows clusters exists which might be used for cheap HA, HPC requirements. Solaris is bit of a floater - it competes with both HP-UX at one end and Linux/Windows on the other. Due to it's popularity with ISVs, it continues to thrive (& will continue to do so) despite not being a perfect fit in either segments. (see tpc.org)
Probably EDS was not pushing Opensource to the satisfaction of opensource community because they are trying to bite the higher end of the datacenter apple. This actually makes EDS a very lucarative buy!
By Al War Ming on May. 22, 2008
> What do you think the HP/EDS deal means for open source?
It's good news.
HP has strong reasons to stay with OpenSource/Linux. HP is not going to pull the plug on Opensource, not anytime soon atleast. Whereas, EDS brings different markets to HP (see other blogs). So HP would inject Opensource to new markets using the EDS' hooks into it's existing customers. That's just a prediction based on who is the bigger elephant in this dance.
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