HP announces support for Debian Linux.
(InfoWorld) – “Hewlett-Packard is throwing its support behind the Debian Linux distribution, the first major hardware maker to align itself with the noncommercial community-based Linux offering… HP also announced Monday that unit sales of 1.5 million Linux servers generated revenue of close to $6.2 billion for the 12 months ending in May, 50 percent more revenue than its nearest competitor.”
I think we'll continue to see some interesting alignments between vendors and Linux distributions: Lenovo's announced SuSE support, HP aligns with Debian. The Dell Linux site makes it clear they're not going to lose a sale over the choice of OS: you can pick your own, but RedHat and Novell SuSE are their top picks.
We don't want to go back to the one hardware vendor – one OS model: Ultrix, Solaris, HPUX, and the rest created a Balkanization of UNIX that lead to its downfall. However, vendors supporting Linux, especially multiple flavors, is a good sign.