HP And Bruce Perens

After Bruce Perens' brief stint as a venture capitalist (which followed his stint with Debian and OSI among other organizations), he has moved on to work with HP in a sort of consulting role for all things Open Source inside and outside of the company. The article talks about HPs questionable history (including the recent printer driver debacle among other things) and what sort of things Bruce will be up to.

Comments

Careful

[American AC in Paris]

Are we sure this is the real HP? It could be an impostor...

(no disrespect intended)

$ man reality

HP Open Source History

[Baldrson]

While he was at HP, Joe Ellsworth convinced me that IBM was going to support Linux well in advance of the Forbes magazine cover story on open source. That's what got me to create the LibmUX claim at Idea Futures back in July of 1998 predicting that IBM would ship a Linux server before July of 1999. That turned out to be a month or two optimistic, but you have to understand that at the time, none of the suits really believed open source, let alone Linux, would be supported by the big server companies.

In August of 1998, while at the first open source conference, I briefly talked with Tim O'Reilly about approaching Paul Allen's Interval Research concerning open source strategies. I had a few well placed contacts at Interval and I figured if Linus would go work for Allen, maybe it was appropriate that Allen's think tank get in the act. However, it turned out that my contact with Joe was more important than my contact with Interval.

Joe Ellsworth's foresignt at HP turned out to be critical to HP's participation with open source -- something I think he should have received more credit for initiating. Joe knew it would be very difficult if not impossible to get Idea Futures set up as an executive decision support system within HP, so predictions like my (his) LibmUX claim weren't enough to establish priority for open source ideas within HP.

Nevertheless, we did discuss the idea of setting up prize awards for achievement of various open source objectives and after the first open source conference, Joe took that idea and ran with it within HP management, as well as contacting O'Reilly. The end result of his effort was a meeting with representatives of O'Reilly Associates on the same day that I departed for Russia. In fact, I walked Joe to the first meeting with Brian Behlendorf on my way out to catch Aeroflot. Joe thought he had convinced key managers of the HP-UX division to put up almost $10 million in a variety of open source awards that would have systematically converted all of HP-UX's administrative utilities to Linux as a way of channeling the growing base of Apache servers into the HP family of large servers. It was a great positive sum vision that I still think would have worked. In fact, I was convinced enough of its merit that I was traveling to Russia, on my own nickle, to discover what the impediments might be from the perspective of the Russian Academy of Sciences, to distributing prize awards in Russia for open source projects should HP actually come through with some major award money. The RAS desperately needed (and still needs) hard cash for their programming teams. That meeting with O'Reilly went well and my meeting with the RAS folks got their interest up and exposed some of the pragmatics of distributing such prize awards in Russia.

Fortunately, I presented the Russians with a lot of caveats, knowing how often they have been let down by Americans before. I say "fortunately" because support within HP with O'Reilly quickly went a fairly different direction than Joe (or I) had envisioned. For some reason, HP decided not to fund prizes for the massive translation of HP-UX utilities to Linux, and what money was available for prize awards was limited to US participants. Also, for some reason, Joe was not kept as the lead representative in the relationship with O'Reilly Associates and the rules governing the Open Awards program were substantially altered from the original internal white paper on the concept.

I don't know the status of all of this, lo these 2 years later, but its pretty clear to me the entire open source community could benefit from a way to set up objective prize awards, with provision for second and third place contenders. That way programming teams in developing (or recovering) economies can eat and (in the case of Russia) keep from freezing in the winter as they bring their manifest skills to bear on open source.

PPA printers

[Dr. Tom]

PPA printers are like Winmodems; they offload processing to the host CPU, so are cheaper to manufacture, and cost (a tiny bit; $$) less to buy. HP has repeatedly, consistently, and officially refused to release the info required to write PPA drivers, because the advanced color correction done by the driver contains valuable HP intellectual property that they don't want to release.

I can see their point. If they did release the information, and a competitor started using the same color correction algorithm, HP would have no way to know that that competitor had stolen the code and violated HP's copyright (since the competitor wouldn't open the source either). The assurances of large companies that they do not violate licenses like the GPL apparently are not enough for HP.

If only there were a way to enforce their copyright without resorting to expensive reverse-engineering and legal battles, that would clear the way for HP (and many other companies) to release Open Source products. Are there any technical solutions? How can you know if somebody is using your code in violation of the GPL?

Meanwhile, fortunately for PPA owners, a rather good reverse-engineering effort has resulted in a working Linux driver that has been included in several distributions:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pnm2ppa/

Keep up the good work!

Re:PPA printers

[Bruce Perens]

The Free Software community is well able to come up with its own color correction. This is a well-known art, with lots of technical papers published on it. You might not get color correction as good as what HP does, but you'd get good enough and knowing you folks, you could improve on the state of the art. What we need is to be able to send raw pixels to the printers, something that does not require the disclosure of HP's color correction algorithm. So, I don't really consider this a reason to keep from releasing a printer driver.

Thanks

Bruce

Re:My personal experience with HP and a suggestion

[Bruce Perens]

Hi Flavio,

The lack of printer drivers (and by extension, other hardware drivers) is the number one thing I'm hearing about from the community. I have now collected a mandate from one division to deal with it, and will work on another division tomorrow. Right now you can look at hp.sourceforge.com and a second effort on sourceforge that deals with HP printers, but possibly not the printers you want. I will probably have to visit the printer divisions in Ohio and Washington state to talk with people. My desire is that all HP hardware interfaces be open and documented. Obviously, I will have to evangelize that within the company. I will have something to say, and something to show, at LinuxWorld in NY, but will not have finished with the issue by then. It could take much longer. In some cases documentation doesn't exist, in some cases you may be able to command the device to destroy itself, in some cases the existing Windows driver contains other people's proprietary IP, not just HPs, etc. So, this will be a pain to deal with, but it'll get done.

Thanks

Bruce

HP history and pnm2ppa - from a core developer

[ajv]

I'm one of the leads on pnm2ppa. We have had several leads with HP since I joined the project last year. This is the most comprehensive reply from HP on their position wrt PPA printers.

I've asked some of the original protocol developers and they don't have access to the documentation anymore. I've asked some of my friends who work at HP, and their access to the places where this doco is stored came up empty.

I've asked maddog via his Linux International link (of which HP is also a primary sponsor) to talk to HP for us, but never received a reply. He's a busy dude, so I didn't mind too much.

PPA printers are well supported using pnm2ppa 1.0.4. Usuable versions are in most of the distributions now, and we are FreeBSD/NetBSD/BeOS compatible (and for that matter, cygwin and simple to make under Visual C++). I develop under NetBSD on the alpha, and it's 64 bit clean.

About the last thing I'm going to work on is ghostscript integration. We need some help from the ghostscript dudes as we must calibrate our printers, so that should be fun.

PPA printers do use a lot of CPU time. We feed the printer data that is ready for the print head - there is nearly nothing in the three families of PPA printers. The sheer amount of data is uneconomical from the point of view of how fast you can send data down, and the level of compression we can achieve in the protocol is only moderate in comparison to PS or PCL3e (which is what the other HP deskjets use).