Hardware companies don’t tend to have their own Linux distributions. IBM uses Linux everywhere, but they don’t have their own Linux. Dell will be happy to sell you notebooks and netbooks with Ubuntu or a workstation or server with RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux). But, no major OEM (original equipment manufacturer) has had a house-brand Linux… until now. HP has recently bought not one, but two Linux distributions.
Surely HP is not getting into the Linux distribution business? Are they!?
HP first acquired its own Linux distribution bough Palm to get its hand on webOS. For some reason, a lot of people seemed to think that Palm was still using its old proprietary operating system, Palm OS. Nope. WebOS has proprietary extensions but this mobile device OS with its Linux kernel heart has more in common with Android and MeeGo than it does with its proprietary fore-bearers.