HP May Be Developing Its Own Version of Linux

vondiggity writes to tell us that HP is working on several different ways to make an end run around Vista. Among the plans is also a supposed rumor that certain factions within HP are developing their own flavor of Linux. Executives at HP deny that any meaningful amount of resources are being directed into plans for a mass-market operating system, stating their main goal is to innovate on top of Vista. "Still, the sources say employees in HP's PC division are exploring the possibility of building a mass-market operating system. HP's software would be based on Linux, the open-source operating system that is already widely available, but it would be simpler and easier for mainstream users, the sources say. The goal may be to make HP less dependent on Windows and to strengthen HP's hand against Apple (AAPL), which has gained market share in recent years by offering easy-to-use computers with its own operating system."

Re:Obligitory Yoda Quote

[Creepy Crawler]

But in the Linux wars, we all win.

The bazaar is selling the steeple from the cathedral on eBay

Re:Lest we get excited.

[Narishma]

The difference is the license. With the BSD license, Apple can do whatever they like and aren't required to release their modifications.

Re:I've been saying this for years...

[nine-times]

Why would they have to do that? It seems like they'd gain more fans and get continued community support by not-forking.

I agree that it might be to their benefit to go their own way and optimize for their own purposes, but if they start from Linux, they're going to have release the source code anyway. Purposefully making it hard to patch those improvements back into the vanilla code is going to piss off a bunch of potential customers, and make it harder to port community improvements over to their version.

Linux will be a successful desktop OS if someone can put enough pressure on major desktop app developers to release their software to on it. Or, depending on your criteria, Linux is already a successful desktop OS.

Rob Enderle

[Anonymous Coward]

From the article: "It's an endrun around Windows," says Rob Enderle, president of tech consultant Enderle Group.

Referencing Rob Enderle?! Good $deity, that's like mentioning Nazis in an internet discussion. Credibility meet window (no pun intended).

Innovate my nVidia

[notknown86]

Maybe they could "innovate" a version of Linux which stops a laptop booting after a year and a bit of use . Just a second... my HP DV2000 already does that. Thanks assholes.

Re:Lest we get excited.

[Warbothong]

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system) [wikipedia.org]

"OpenDarwin was a community-led operating system based on the Darwin platform. It was founded in April 2002 by Apple Inc. and Internet Systems Consortium. Its goal was to increase collaboration between Apple developers and the free software community. Apple theoretically benefited from the project because improvements to OpenDarwin would be incorporated into Darwin releases; and the free/open source community supposedly benefited from being given complete control over its own operating system, which could then be used in free software distributions such as GNU-Darwin.[11]

On July 25, 2006, the OpenDarwin team announced that the project was shutting down, as they felt OpenDarwin had "become a mere hosting facility for Mac OS X related projects," and that the efforts to create a standalone Darwin operating system had failed. They also state: "Availability of sources, interaction with Apple representatives, difficulty building and tracking sources, and a lack of interest from the community have all contributed to this."[12] The last stable release was version 7.2.1, released on July 16, 2004. [1]"

WebKit was a massive code dump of KHTML, modified so much that merging those changes would require more effort than starting a whole new project.

Whilst I think that all open source code contributions are a good thing, to me Apple's policy seems to consist of fork-by-default, then contribute back anything for which that would be too costly.

Re:Lest we get excited.

[that this is not und]

Except they kept the OS closed enough to it killed OpenDarwin.

I used to run Darwin on a Beige G3 that wasn't powerful enough to run MacOSX. But it's an abandonware OS now, largely because Apple shut them out.

We use Debian

[Anonymous Coward]

As a currently employee at HP we use Debian for almost everything we can. While I havn't heard about this project at all I am willing to bet if anything it will be Debian based. HP currently employs many Debian developer and requires many manufactures to provide Debian packages for use with HP products. Internally most HP GNU/Linux development for non-server stuff(think ThinClients, NAS, etc) are all Debian.