(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.
- Customers have far more FOSS than they realize.
- 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.
I recently spent some time talking with Christine Martino, Hewlett-Packard's vice president of Linux and open source, about HP's plans to provide services around open-source software. That HP is doing this is now old news (the news broke this week).
But the truly interesting thing in this is HP itself. HP is an appropriate company to take this on, given the extent of its adoption of open source and the sophistication with which it manages that open source internally. Back when I was part of Novell's Open Source Review Board, it was HP that helped to shape the processes that made the Novell OSRB successful.
Christine elaborated:
Free and open-source software is everywhere. It's not just Linux (not that Linux is just one thing, anyway). At HP we've been using free and open-source software throughout our company for years as a consumer and contributor of free and open-source software.
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