HP has the ability to run Red Hat’s distribution on its Helion OpenStack platform and welcomes a certification for it. So, why won’t Red Hat certify it on HP? At HP Discover 2014 in Las Vegas earlier this month, Saar Gillai, Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer for HP Cloud, joined John Furrier and Dave Vellante on theCUBE and talked about his bewilderment of why Red Hat won’t certify on HP’s platform.

The Background Story

When Vellante asked Gillai to explain the story behind this subject, he responded with two points. First of all, Gillaia believes that there shouldn’t be this artificial connection between Linux and OpenStack. He said that this was one of the things he noticed when he talked to customers. Some Linux vendors try to create an artificial connection that, when using OpenStack, requires the use of a certain version of Linux. As a result, customers potentially end up paying various licensing fees.

This is one of the reasons why HP Helion OpenStack comes with a host Linux built into it, based on Debian. “We’d be happy to get that into OpenStack for everybody. It’s not specific to HP,” Gillai added. He then went on to say that he doesn’t think that things happening in Linux should dictate what people do in OpenStack.

Secondly, Gillai thinks that people should be free to use whatever guest operating system they want. He explained there are vendors who believe their guest should solely work with their host. Gillia considers this “somewhat monopolistic,” and believes that customers have now figured out the restrictions with this tactic.

Is Red Hat Discriminating Against OpenStack?

Red Hat certified its distribution on VMware and Windows. Yet it would appear Red Hat doesn’t want to certify it on someone else’s OpenStack. “I think the question remains with them why they should discriminate against OpenStack specifically. I thought they were big supporters of OpenStack,” said Gillai.

Vellante added he would’ve thought that when critical mass was reached, that Red Hat would certify its distribution on HP’s platform because it’s just good business. Gillai responded saying that the way things like this work out, especially in open source, is by leaving it with the customers.

See the entire conversation below.