OSBC Report: HP's Karl Paetzel on the tools of open-source proliferation

(Credit: Matt Asay)

Karl Paetzel, part of HP's Enterprise Storage and Server Division and part of HP's growing open-source business. As he noted in his opening remarks, HP has realized more than $10 billion in open source-related revenue in the past few years.

1. Customers have far more FOSS than they realize.
2. Customers have far more FOSS license obligations than they realize.

On Point #2, Karl noted that a big issue derives from embedded licenses. OpenOffice, for example, may be licensed under the GPL, but there are hundreds (thousands?) of packages within that program that carry other open-source licenses. HP has therefore developed its FOSSology tool to help it manage internally used open-source code, but more recently to help its customers (and the broader community).

I was fortunate to work with HP back in my Novell days on open-source issues. Novell used HP as its model for an open source review board. I particularly like how HP doesn't crimp open-source adoption by shutting down downloads. Rather, it evaluates open-source usage at the point of distribution/release. It therefore gives its employees room to experiment.

Tools like this, marketed correctly, help to broaden open-source adoption. Marketed incorrectly (as "safe ways to use risky software"), they're unproductive. I think HP is going about it in the right way.

[TimBowden]

Matt, A tool like FOSSology is great, but it does point to a well known problem; License proliferation. We will probably never get down to the four or five licenses needed in the ideal world (thanks Bruce), but we have way more than we need. If we're not careful, the open source world may end up re-creating some of the licensing headaches we're trying to escape from. Perhaps if every year we (the open source community) were to identify the 10 least useful OSI licenses and work towards their deprecation we would be doing ourselves a big favor. Sure the political infighting would be difficult (to put it mildly) but the longer we leave this battle, the more difficult it becomes. The longer we leave it the more costly the problem gets. We should be working towards license compatibility whilst acknowledging there are some fundamental disagreements in the community about freedom and how best to define and protect it (here's nodding to you GPL and BSDish camps). Any move that increases license incompatibility should be not be taken lightly (or indeed at all).

[nealish]

I completely agree!!