:-) Craig Lalley wrote:

> Since HP has given up the PA-Risc chip, why would they spend all their
> time creating and maintaining a proprietary OS, when LINUX is free.
> This doesn't seem to follow HP's new business model of low priced
> commodity products.

Don't make the mistake of assuming that business model applies to
all businesses HP is in.

re: Linux - it's great for some things, not so great for others.
Right now, it doesn't scale to large machines, unless significant
customization (ala SGI) is deployed. It's real great if you want
to run a farm of web servers or rendering engines - but there are
still manageability and deployment issues. Bottom line, it's not
"enterprise-ready" yet in most people's opinion. Will it be? Most
likely, but not real soon.

Also don't make the mistake of stating Linux is free. The TCO is
not as great as you might think in a business environment. It's
definitely an improvement over more proprietary solutions, but it's
*not* "free" unless you're just running a machine in your garage.
Right now the savings is in initial cost of hardware, but support
costs are increasing as Red Hat and others figure out that's where
the money is.

> I believe it was posted on this list an article where HP was pushing
> RedHat to develop an Enterprise version of Redat to run on Superdome.

Sure - but they'll have to wait until the kernel supports 64-way
systems, which Linus has been stalling on for some time. SGI had to
roll their own - Red Hat isn't going to do that IMHO.

> I too am strugling with the ideas of where to spend my energies.  What
> is the life span of HP-UX.  (Maybe we can discuss something other than
> Saddam or WMD, quite frankly no one has changed their opinions.)
>
> So, what do people think?  Is there a future for HP-UX?

Personally, I think Eric was trolling by asking the question to begin
with. There are SIGNIFICANT revenue streams for HP in UX systems that
no one is going to walk away from.

--
Greg Cagle
gregc at gregcagle dot com

* To join/leave the list, search archives, change list settings, *
* etc., please visit http://raven.utc.edu/archives/hp3000-l.html *