We've written before about how, among large commercial open source companies, Red Hat's model of offering support and services for free software has proven to be a big winner. The company delivers quarter after quarter of outstanding earnings, and is building quite a large mountain of cash. At the upcoming Red Hat Summit, September 1st through 4th in Chicago, Cisco will be a major sponsor, and Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Dell will be on hand. As The Var Guy notes, "for at least a few days — at its own conference — Red Hat will be seated at the center of the server universe." Meanwhile, Microsoft isn't ignoring the company, either.

Today, Hewlett-Packard--the world's number one PC vendor--has announced a new line of notebook computers called ProBooks, with one shown here. The systems fall into the prosumer space (professional/consumer) and are bigger and more fully stocked than most netbooks. Notably, HP is offering SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 as an operating system choice on the ProBooks, in addition to Windows Vista and XP. HP's arch-rival Dell is also continuing to ship portable computers with Linux installed, and is seeing many users satisfied with Linux. Can Linux remain a fixture on portable systems?

HP has been quirky over the years when it comes to open source. It has been, traditionally, a company that supports open source -- especially in larger enterprises. While large businesses are a major focus for HP -- and it has supported open source in other ways -- a "smaller business" line of open source products has been a long time coming.

HP is approaching this market with both fists flying. Wednesday, it announced two new open source products, geared to small businesses and educational institutions.