HP calls on IBM, Sun to nix OS licenses
Published:10-August-2005
By BR staff writer
To help nudge Linux and open source software further into the enterprise, a vice president at Hewlett-Packard Co yesterday called on rivals IBM Corp and Sun Microsystems Inc to invalidate their open-source software licenses in favor of a free licensing model.
During his keynote at the LinuxWorld Conference in San Francisco yesterday, HP's vice president of open source and NonStop Enterprise Martin Fink commended the Open Source Initiative on setting up new rules to limit the growth of open-source licenses.
Fink also congratulated Intel Corp for being the first company to "openly and proactively" deprecate the open-source license it had created. He urged others to "stop the proliferation of open-source islands" in the form of licenses, "because if we didn't do that then we would be in a situation where we have a bunch of open-source [products] that can't talk to each other and can't share - and sharing is the foundation of what makes open source works," Fink said.
He asked IBM to deprecate its open-source license and instead put it under the General Public License, the most popular license for free software that gives users the freedom run the program for any purpose, to study how it works, to modify and improve it and distribute copies. In contrast, an open-source license, like IBM's, is copyrighted.
Fink also called on Sun Microsystems to deprecate its Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL), which applies to OpenSolaris, GlassFish and JWSDP, and to re-license Solaris 10 under the General Public License, which drew the crowd's applause.
If IBM took its open-source licenses to GPL, Fink said he would give IBM chief Samuel Palmisano and other company top brass, Nick Donofrio and Irving Wladawsky-Berger a new HP laptop preloaded with Linux. If Sun complied, Fink said he would also give chief Scott McNealy and president Jonathan Schwartz a new HP laptop - except theirs would be pre-loaded with Windows.
"Well, [Microsoft and Sun] are buddies now aren't they?" he quipped as the crowd made a collective mock taunt. "I'm going to get some phone calls later today," Fink joked.
Fink also made a dig at another HP rival IBM. In keeping with the main gag of his keynote - a raffle to give away six iPods as a way to help HP reduce its inventory (the company recently discontinued selling the popular Apple Computer product) - he showed the audience an iPod engraved with Intel chief Paul Otellini's name as a thank you to the company for its leadership role in open source licensing.
"Intel is very excited these days because they won a new contract in order to put their chips in Macs because Apple's chip supplier couldn't figure out how," Fink said, referring, of course, to IBM.
To end his presentation, which included a testimonial from HP Linux workstation customer Reactrix Systems Inc, Fink announced a new HP development project built on its high-end NonStop platform. HP would donate NonStop servers, formerly called Tandem, to premier universities around the world as an intellectual-property sharing project to enhance Linux kernel.
Earlier in the day, Oracle Corp president Charles Phillips gave the show's first keynote in which he described Linux as a key component of Oracle's technology stack. He pointed to Linux as serving as Oracle's predictable and standard operating system. "That's been our strategy for years - to pick things that are standard," he said of Oracle's Linux choice.
Linux is increasingly being adopted by Oracle customers and more than 1,500 independent software vendors now support Oracle on Linux, Phillips said. During the past year, he said more customers have moved to Linux machines to run databases and application servers, rather than slowly migrating from one to the next.
Marquee Oracle Linux customers include Amazon.com and Australia's largest telecommunications company Testra Corp Ltd.
Phillips also talked at length about Oracle's own use of Linux. For instance, he cited Oracle's On Demand Center in Austin, Texas, which comprises 10,000 servers and 2.5-petabyes of storage, runs Linux. "One of our fastest-growing businesses at Oracle is our On Demand business ... and we're building it on Linux," he said.
Without elaborating further, Phillips also said, "We're running Linux internally at Oracle on middle-tier today."
Enterprise grid computing is an upcoming Linux target for Oracle. Phillips said leading-edge Oracle customers have built grids using Intel and Linux machines. "If you look at the strategy around grid computing, Linux is very, very important to that," he said.
Phillips said, in closing, "Rest assured that Oracle is 100% behind Linux, [we have] a lot of resources behind it and we'll keep innovating."
