Grommet? Was that a good name?
Are HP making cracking contraptions these days, Gwendoline?
What's the latest enterprise IT company to proclaim its love of open source? HP, that's who – or, more specifically, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, one of two companies that will emerge once HP splits this November. Speaking at the HP Discover conference in Las Vegas this week, CTO Martin Fink said open source will be central to …
Are HP making cracking contraptions these days, Gwendoline?
He actually used to be in charge of all open source at HP and has supported & worked with a very large number of open source projects, communities & efforts since around 2001. Maybe because he's a suit he's not your cup of tea, but he has been at the forefront of HP's open source for decades. He also wrote a book about how large organizations should participate in open source and how open source centric tech businesses should be structured.
So, yeah, lots of experience, probably more than most people who read el reg. And probably more than any other high-level exec at old skool tech companies.
And, no, I don't work for HP - I used to do a lot of work bridging between the open source community & large companies, so I know more than a little something about the people who actually did real work.
Going back a bit it was easier to get Debian on to HP servers than Dell - which is why we have bought HP (approx 10/12 servers) for the last ten years. ISTR they had released drivers as open source and had Debian install images available - and probably as a result we've never hit a problem installing Debian/Ubuntu. Their ILO stuff where you can get a web interface to the hardware bypassing the OS ain't bad either - but it does need licenses which complicates things - so if they release that as open source as well then that would be helpful.
Funny, but I could get Debian loaded but not stable on HP.
Dell is easier because there more support in the community out there for drivers etc and there's more in the Dell boxes for industry standard supports.
ILO is annoying - we just use native IPMI, SNMP, SMTP, etc.
Sadly HPE is a Dead Man Walking with Meh Whitman at the helm, and backed by the slack jawed drooling idiots on the BoD.
Whitman has blown more billions of dollars than anyone in the world, save the US Government.
I have friends that work there and they don't have a single positive thing to say about what's going on at HP. It looks very bleak.