From the NY Times:
=======================================================
HP to Become Preferred Vendor of Red Hat Linux

March 19, 2003
By REUTERS

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Computer and printer maker
Hewlett-Packard Co (HPQ.N) and Linux software distributor
Red Hat Inc. (RHAT.O) said on Tuesday they had struck an
agreement making HP a preferred provider of services to
support Red Hat's Linux offerings for large corporate
customers.

HP rivals International Business Machines Corp. (IBM.N) and
Dell Computer Corp. (DELL.O) already have similar status
with Red Hat, said Mike Evans, vice president of channel
sales and development for Raleigh, North Carolina-based Red
Hat.

Linux, a variant of the venerable Unix operating system, is
freely available, and tens of thousands of software
developers contribute to it. It has emerged as a threat not
only to Microsoft Corp.'s (MSFT.O) Windows operating
system, but also to proprietary operating systems used by
IBM, HP and Sun Microsystems Inc. (SUNW.O).

Until recently, Linux had been making big gains on the
so-called edge of a company's computer infrastructure, but
now it is also making headway into the more sophisticated,
mission-critical portions of a company's computer systems,
such as data centers and transaction processing, analysts
have said.

``As Linux is becoming a bigger and bigger part of our
business, it's now moving fairly and squarely from a strong
position in network-edge applications out into more
mainstream infrastructure and data-center-class
applications,'' said Hugh Jenkins, head of marketing for
HP's industry-standard servers.

Industry standard servers are those that use Intel Corp.
compatible chips, known as x86, either with processors that
crunch data in 32-bit chunks or with Intel's Itanium 64-bit
microprocessor.

Microprocessors are the brains of a personal computer,
workstation, notebook PC, server computer or mainframe
computer.

The agreement, making Red Hat the preferred version of
Linux that HP would sell to customers, was not struck
sooner because HP was still in the process of integrating
Compaq Computer, which it bought last May for $18.7
billion.

``HP is kind of a new company,'' Jenkins said. ``While we
had in both companies pre-merger a great relationship with
Red Hat, it was probably fair to say that agreements were
spread far and wide'' throughout the two companies.

While HP said it would honor customers' requests to work
with other Linux vendors, the agreement could have a
negative effect on other sellers of Linux software, such as
Conectiva SA, the SCO Group, SuSe Linux AG and Turbolinux
Inc., which together have formed a consortium called United
Linux.


http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/technology/tech-tech-hewlettpackard-redhat.html?ex=1049084768&ei=1&en=277bed0082dbbf8a


Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

--------------------------------
Tom Brandt
Northtech Systems, Inc.
130 S. 1st Street, Suite 220
Ann Arbor, MI 48104-1343
http://www.northtech.com/

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