Of course HP is scared.
If Mr. Ballmer finds out, he will personally and single-handedly castrate the whole HP board.
Hewlett-Packard is making an effort to support non-commercial Linux distributions on its servers and other vendors' business hardware. But you wouldn't know it from the black hole of fanfare regarding its new collaborative portal, communitylinux.org. Word of the launch came as a brief reference at a LinuxCon talk by Bdale …
Anything that can provide support for Linuxen has got to be good news - plus that seems like a nice spread of distro's they're covering. And given that it's HP ponying up the $$$'s for the site I'm not really surprised at the (initial) HP-centricity.
Personally I'm pleased by this, HP has done some really bone-headed stuff in the past (and probably still will) but this definitely doesn't fit into the "bone head" category. If it helps to improve Linux running on ProLiant/Superdome/etc then so much the better - heck if that then shifts a few more boxes then I'm sure the HP bean counters won't mind.
Re: "Warranty" (Greem) - erm the article says that the disclaimer states that running these Linuxen will _not_ invalidate the warranty. In my experience this is unusual because most h/w vendors treat "non-approved" software like a bag of starved and rabid wolverines.
Re: "Of course HP is scared" (AC) - ah, don't think so. Don't forget that HP still punts a shedload of MS gear. Plus there's 11 board members and I'm sure that even "Hulk" Ballmer can't project chairs fast enough to hit all of them. And of course you've got Mark Hurd with his (well used - grr!) pink-slip Gatling. I think him v's Ballmer would be an even match - although I wish I could get the MortalKombat style screen display out of my imagination ...
Austin Modine typed "Garbee said the website was announced this week, but that's news to us + everyone + dog."
That's possibly because you're not following the "HPLinux" feed on Twitter - as it was announced there - check out the tweets for 8am-9am on the 21st. (And it was also announced on the internal penguin-herder lists in HP for some word-of-mouth advertising - that's how I got to hear about it because my iPod-based Twitter reader is screwed at the moment)
Still at least a mention in El Reg is good for spreading the word a bit further... :D
BobX @ HP
Thanks, Bob. For readers: the site was announced here: http://twitter.com/HPLinux/status/4147916200
/tbc
P.S. I tried to register an account yesterday, but I never got an email confirmation. Seems El Reg doesn't support plussed addressing. I had to try again today with a Sxipper email address. Got confirmation right away. But now I'm user tbc *and* tbc0. Sigh. :(