Dell: No shelter against SCO suits (News.com) [LWN.net]

News.com reports on a speech by Michael Dell in which he states that Dell will not be offering indemnification for its Linux customers. He also talks about other directions being taken by the company: "'Eight-way (servers) are less than 1 percent of the market and shrinking pretty dramatically,' Dell said. 'If our competitors want to claim they're No. 1 in eight-ways, that's fine. We want to lead the market with two-way and four-way (processor machines).'" This comment has already rekindled the "how far should we scale" debate on linux-kernel.

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Dell: No shelter against SCO suits (News.com)

Posted Sep 3, 2003 18:32 UTC (Wed) by libra (guest, #2515) [Link]

I would gladly be one of those people using Linux on Dell computer without their support if Dell was not recommending Windows so strongly for its laptops that it comes to the point that I can not find any of them without the damn operating system installed.
That is sad because I really would like to have a Dell, but just a bit cheaper, and really without Windows, that point is a strong requirement (to avoid the temptation of using it).

Dell: No shelter against SCO suits (News.com)

Posted Sep 3, 2003 19:46 UTC (Wed) by namaseit (guest, #13940) [Link] (1 responses)

So it basicly comes down to the Corporate market bitching about how "linux
doesnt scale" and now its scales like no other OS and all of a sudden they
saying, "well it was never that important anyways". One more reason i
disagree with commercializing linux so much.

Dell: No shelter against SCO suits (News.com)

Posted Sep 3, 2003 20:10 UTC (Wed) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

I don't recall Dell ever being a proponent of huge boxes. I doubt they have the backplane for it, regardless of OS support. They seem to be more interested in clusters of 2 or 4 processor boxes. The corporate market isn't any more uniform than slashdot readers; it was IBM (and SGI and Sun) pushing for large processor counts, and Dell who likes small SMP.

Dell: No shelter against SCO suits (News.com)

Posted Sep 4, 2003 0:52 UTC (Thu) by dbhost (guest, #3461) [Link] (2 responses)

With the advent of clustering, why bother with large processor counts? Our virtualization systems run large Beuwulf clusters of Dell Dual Xeon systems. The difference is that clusters are far more fault tolerant than SMP boxes anyway, and you get the same, or better performance, for a much lower cost using clustering, that seems to hold true for out applications no matter the OS, Windows, Linux, or whatever... SMP simply seems to be a waste of time, and IT budget, past the fairly common dual CPU systems...

Dell: No shelter against SCO suits (News.com)

Posted Sep 4, 2003 9:51 UTC (Thu) by mdekkers (guest, #85) [Link]

fast, shared memory anyone? They types of work you do on big iron boxes as opposed to cluster typyically involves interactive type calculations, where different calculations qre dependent on each other. Weather simulation is very dependent on this for example. i am a big fan of grid/clustered systems, but big iron is sometimes the only sane way to go.

Dell: No shelter against SCO suits (News.com)

Posted Sep 4, 2003 11:07 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

I/O heavy rather than number crunching? A cluster will collapse under that scenario while a SMP solution will say "load? what load?".

PC's are the Formula 1 of the computing world - and bl**dy useless when you need to shift a couple of 40ft containers ...

Cheers,
Wol

Dell: No shelter against SCO suits (News.com)

Posted Sep 4, 2003 2:28 UTC (Thu) by dusty (guest, #14668) [Link]

Dell is screwed and they know it, so why not make a little FUD infavor of their own bread and butter. IBM has kicked them in the balls and they know it...HP still doesnt know what the correct time is. SCO know knows what time it is,but they are playing the wrong team. SCo is screwed, IBM, Redhat, and SuSe are in the game....bigtime.

the saga continues.....Linux cannot be controlled!!!!!!!!!!

Dell: No shelter against SCO suits (News.com)

Posted Sep 4, 2003 5:32 UTC (Thu) by wartstew (guest, #9819) [Link]

Companies never give indemnification for software. Microsoft certainly didn't
with it's recent suit filed against it about code it used in their SQL server. So
the end users got hit with a new license fee schedule. The boomerang effect
of the SCO suit is that Open Source will probably prove to be safer to use
without fear of someone attacking you for IP rights.

Dell: No shelter against SCO suits (News.com)

Posted Sep 4, 2003 5:35 UTC (Thu) by wartstew (guest, #9819) [Link]

I don't see SCO offering indemnification for it's software that IBM is counter
suing them over?

Dell: No shelter against SCO suits (News.com)

Posted Sep 4, 2003 7:19 UTC (Thu) by danielpf (guest, #4723) [Link]

This is again a stupid ambiguous position about Linux that
Dell becomes renowned for. No clear Linux policy means less
customers in the server market, which becomes very important.
For example a company such as Transtec advertises selling
over 80% of servers with Linux.

As an illustration we had recently very similar offers
for a Beowulf cluster of 24 dual Xeon units from:
Dell, a small PC shop, Transtec and Sun Microsystem.
Dell had a very nice price+hardware offer but wasn't
retained for two reasons:
1) Lack of a clear Linux committment,
2) Poor hardware support record.

Dell: No shelter against SCO suits (News.com)

Posted Sep 4, 2003 12:32 UTC (Thu) by walterbyrd (guest, #11620) [Link]

To even seriously even discuss this, is to fall for msft/scox fud. Don't you get it? This indemnification thing is just another way for msft/scox to bash linux.

The entire arguement doesn't even begin to make sense. Like IBM, Dell is *not* even a linux distributer.

msft/scox theatens to sue linux users, and any company associated with linux, as a way to bash linux. Then msft/scox further bashes linux by screaming that linux companies are not indemnifying linux end users.

To discuss this seriously, you are eating out of msft/scox's hands. This is nothing but a blantant scam. It amazes me that everybody can't see right through it.

Dell: No shelter against SCO suits (News.com)

Posted Sep 4, 2003 12:57 UTC (Thu) by emkey (guest, #144) [Link]

The thing a lot of people here seem to be missing is that Intel doesn't offer a solution that scales to 8 CPU's. A year or so back they didn't even offer a solution with the memory bandwidth to support more then two CPU's. There newer offerings are better but still unlikely to provide the memory bandwidth to support and eight way system. AMD on the other hand...