Ms. Fiorina, we in the open-source community are very pleased to
hear you acknowledge that “The open source movement is natural,
inevitable and creates huge benefits. It’s part of the next wave of
computing, and that will involve participants and users within the
industry in open source.”
You’ve talked the talk. Now, can you walk the walk?
A good, easy first step would be for HP to open a website
giving access to complete interface specifications for its entire
printer line, including its WinPrinters. Even before you began
to understand the benefits of open source, making life more
difficult for third-party software developers could only have had
the effect of shrinking the potential market for HP’s hardware. We
frankly don’t understand why those specs haven’t been on line for
years already.
A good, not quite as easy second step would be to release
your printer driver sources. We understand that this would
require an IP-rights audit on the code, which will take some time;
but an immediate commitment to release all unencumbered sources
would mean a lot more to us (and to your customers!) than general
talk of the goodness of open source.
Your most difficult challenge will, of course, be deciding what
to do about HP-UX. Your version of Unix is aging and has long
suffered from compatibility woes. I know through personal contacts
that there is a large and vocal faction in HP engineering that
would like to see HP-UX end-of-lifed and replaced with Linux (or
one of the open-source BSD Unix versions).
Whether you do that or open-source HP-UX itself won’t be an easy
decision. The community would accept either choice; but I suggest
to you that joining the Linux coalition certainly represents HP’s
best chance of maintaining a market position free of Microsoft’s
strangling grip.
The Open Source Initiative is willing to help you develop
effective licensing, release, and community-relations tactics;
that’s what we’re here for. We’d like to support your open-source
strategy. But there needs to be something more than words for us to
support. While we recognize and applaud HP’s continuing
contribution of engineering time to open-source projects such as
Samba, the bottom line is that HP has yet to open-source any
significant portion of its own code even in those areas where it
would be easiest and most obviously beneficial for the company to
do so.
You’ll find that open-source developers are eager to welcome HP
to the fold, and can be extremely valuable allies in growing your
markets and increasing your product value. But you’ll also find
that we’re rather cynical about ringing endorsements; we’ve heard
those before without result, and they won’t earn you a lot of cred
by themselves without actions and commitments that back them
up.
Show us the code, Ms. Fiorina. That’s where the real cooperation
starts.
—
Eric S. Raymond
President, Open Source Initiative