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Bruce Perens Canned by HP
bmarklein writes "Bruce Perens has been fired by HP for "Microsoft-baiting". This was linked in part to the HP-Compaq merger, since Windows is now a much bigger part of HP's business."
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was that the last reason to do business with HP, falling out the window?
oh, my bad. that was years ago.
MORTAR COMBAT!
...this and some previous happennings are in my journal.
It's better than getting fired for masterbating!
This shows the reach and depth of fear that Microsoft's monopoly can instill in even the biggest and baddest companies on the planet.
I doubt that this came from a purely internal HP-Compaq decision. The forces that be in Redmond probably played a role.
What is Bruce on to next?
Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
William Shakespeare
Balancing Linux and Microsoft
.sincerechoice.org), and its own set of principles. Mr. Perens asserts that governments could get huge cost savings and encourage the spread of open-source software by purchasing only software that operates well with other programs. Under his proposal, software companies would be required to supply software with open technology standards and open file formats that can be used by outside software developers, without having to pay royalties.
By STEVE LOHR
For nearly two years, Bruce Perens was a senior strategist for open-source software at Hewlett-Packard -- an evangelist and rabble-rouser on behalf of a computing counterculture that is increasingly moving into the mainstream. Part of the job description, he was told, was to "challenge H.P. management."
His last day as a Hewlett-Packard employee was 10 days ago. The parting was amicable, Mr. Perens said, but he was fired -- "officially a termination," he noted. "It came after a long, long warning," Mr. Perens explained. "The thing that I did that was most hazardous for H.P. is the Microsoft-baiting I tend to do."
A spokeswoman for Hewlett-Packard declined to comment on Mr. Perens's departure, citing company policy against making public statements about why individual employees leave.
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But, according to Mr. Perens, a handful of forces combined to make his exit from Hewlett-Packard inevitable. After it bought Compaq this year, the combined company became the largest single buyer of Windows for personal computers and data-serving computers, and thus more dependent on Microsoft. A rising threat to Microsoft is GNU Linux, an operating system distributed free and developed using the open-source model in which communities of programmers donate their labor to debug, modify and otherwise improve the code.
After the merger with Compaq, Hewlett also became the largest vendor of Linux-based server computers, ahead of Dell Computer and I.B.M. Yet Hewlett's bet on Linux still pales compared with its reliance on Microsoft. And after the merger, it was mainly former Compaq executives who took senior positions overseeing the Linux business.
In the premerger Hewlett, Mr. Perens, a leader in the open-source movement, enjoyed a lot of independence. When speaking to potential Hewlett customers on Wall Street and elsewhere, he would make the case for Linux, extolling it as a reliable and secure operating system that also allowed corporate customers to avoid being locked in to proprietary software like Microsoft's Windows or Sun Microsystems' Solaris.
Mr. Perens did not have to make the pitch for Hewlett as supplier of choice for Linux-based servers, services or support. That chore fell to Hewlett's sales people. "It was a pretty unique job that existed because of the H.P. culture," Mr. Perens said. "I would still be at H.P., I think, except for the Compaq merger."
Yet beyond the postmerger atmosphere at Hewlett, Mr. Perens also says that he had been taking a more outspoken stance against Microsoft recently. "Microsoft is out to crush Linux as a competitor," said Mr. Perens, who became truly galvanized after the emergence in May of a Microsoft-backed industry group, the Initiative for Software Choice. Besides the chip maker Intel, a close Microsoft ally, most of the other 20 or so members are smaller foreign companies or trade organizations.
The software-choice group sees a threat in what it has identified as 66 legislative proposals, government statements and studies promoting open-source software in 25 countries, including Germany, Britain, China, Peru and Brazil. Some of those legislative proposals would require the use of open-source software in government, but most of the government steps are efforts to ensure there is an alternative to Microsoft in their critical software markets.
The Microsoft-backed group says its purpose is to promote even-handed competition based on the merits of products, instead of a government bias for one kind of software. But as Mr. Perens sees it, the software-choice group has another agenda. "Its principles are nice-sounding words," he said, "but what they really say is, `Let's maintain the status quo.' "
Mr. Perens has stepped in himself and started an effort to respond to the Microsoft-backed group. His initiative, called Sincere Choice, has its own Web site (www
"The royalty-free patent issue is crucial because the companies with huge software patent portfolios, especially Microsoft and I.B.M., have huge tolls booths on the Internet that can limit the spread of open-source software," Mr. Perens observed.
Mr. Perens, 44, has regarded technology as a force for personal freedom since he was a teenager in the Long Island suburbs of New York. He was a ham radio enthusiast, ran a pirate radio station in Lido Beach, N.Y., and was briefly a "phone phreak," who could trick the telephone network into giving free long-distance calls.
His introduction to computing came in college, when he worked at the radio station at the New York Institute of Technology in Old Westbury. Mr. Perens was a station manager, and one of his duties was to prepare the weekly logs of programs to be broadcast, as well as commercials. It was a job for a computer, he figured, and he taught himself the Basic computer language and wrote a program to handle the logs.
The appeal of computing proved irresistible. "I got so involved in the computer that I didn't go to classes anymore," recalled Mr. Perens, who never got a college degree.
Much of his considerable programming skills over the years since have been self-taught, a trait fueled by his early experience with formal education, when he was briefly misdiagnosed as mentally disabled (it was a motor-deficit problem that he soon outgrew). "All of this is about empowering the individual with technology," Mr. Perens said. "That has been a lifelong thrust."
Mr. Perens eventually joined Pixar, where he worked for 12 years on hardware and software tools for the animators of "Toy Story," "Toy Story II" and "A Bug's Life." While working at Pixar, he became more deeply involved in the emerging open-source movement and with Linux.
Having left Hewlett, he is talking to other companies about doing consulting work. "Open source doesn't mean you take a vow of poverty," Mr. Perens said.
Yet Mr. Perens is also deeply committed to the values that he believes the open-source movement embody. "I'm sorry that I had to leave H.P., but I'm not going to shut up about my views," he said. "I'm not just going to sit back and be a quiet engineer. I have a two-year-old son and I don't want him to grow up in a world that is less free.
I know the "NY-Times Free Registration" horse is dead, but it would be nice to warn users that it's a NY Times link, even if it is the usual "Note: Free Registration, blah blah blah, stop pestering us we have more important duties here at Slashdot than editing content...". Or maybe even just a link[nytimes.com] notation.
Just so we don't bother.
It would be even nicer to provide an extra link if it exists. But I guess that IS asking way too much.
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
Hey Bruce, why not run for congress?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
HP needs a big cash inflow to survive. Microsoft currently supplies that. Linux currently doesn't. Case closed. Corporations tend to think of themselves of amoral money-making ventures, and often, with huge companies like HP, any overtures to supporting open source are simply PR moves. PR moves are usually less important than simple cash inflow. If the inflow is going to disrupted by PR (like Bruce Perens), they just chop it off.
Because every browser I've used for the past, oh, 8 years shows the URL for the link in the status bar when you mouse over the link.
But yes, I hate NY Times articles on the web. Which is one reason I cancelled my NY Times print subscription.
MORTAR COMBAT!
I once had someone I admired tell me that "You shouldn't live for anything you aren't willing to die for". I've tried to incorporate that in my decision processes. Clearly, Bruce believes his child, and his freedom is more worth living for than his job at HP.
I get his motivation, I understand where he is coming from, and so, I can relate to him, and less readily dismiss him as a zealot, crackpot, or trouble maker, which is sadly the case with some other prominant free software advocates.
So, Bruce, thanks. You have my respect, even if you haven't got a job.
...or integrity for that matter?
Funny. Compaq (now HP) is running large ads in the trade press touting that they were the first major company to support Linux and Open Source.
Now they fire a major advocate? Sounds like the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.
Oh, wait, that's what those corporate types mean that a merger brings synergies and the opportunity to eliminate redundancies.
Well, so far HP/Compaq sounds like a typical merged company: the power politics of the officers of the originating companies are more important than anything else. They'll either spend 5 years trying to get their shop integrated (meanwhile facing dwindling market share), or they'll undo the merger, with the usual corporatespeak (divestiture, focusing on core business, spinning off unprofitable divisions) that all come down to 'we screwed up; please don't hurt us!'.
</cynism>
Mart"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
Why shouldn't they?
Simple example. It's like CIA getting rid of their resident Arab intelligence advisor, to replace him with some professor from US. It's a bad strategy.
Sometimes you just have to hold on to people who know the emerging markets, even if they do not share the same ideology. Especially now, in a hostile economy, with all the stock market distress, companies are careful not to overrun their budget, and looking for ways to cut costs. What better way to save few million dollars than to replace Windows 2000/XP with Linux. You kill 2 birds with one stone. Increased stability + cost efficiency.
Furthermore, HP/Compaq are in the hardware business. As long as they sell their plastic boxes the investors will be happy.
Dell = 1
HP/Compaq = 0
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The article author needs to work on company names more. Would they refer to IBM as just "International".
It's either Hewlett-Packard or HP.
Fuck HP. They think that getting into bed with MS is the best thing for them? Yeah, right. Wait until MS starts building their own hardware and tosses them aside like used toilet paper in a few years.
People, "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" is how MS got where they are today. Like HP will fair any better than MS's long line of other victims?
Carla needs to put the crack pipe down just for a moment and see the light.
Reboot Monkey, 2nd class
We just bought a half million dollar linux cluster from them. We bought the cluster pre configured and ready to plug in. We told the sales people if it is not linux we won't even think about it. The interesting thing is that we blew off another half million dollar purchase with them because their solution did not support linux. So to make a long story short they gained half million because of linux support but the lost a half million due to non linux support.
I thought he already quit a few weeks ago?
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
here
"I am no longer with Hewlett-Packard. If your company would like to use my expertise in forming an Open Source policy and processes, or operating a relationship with the Open Source developer community, please contact me."
There's no room for gut-buckets like that in modern IT.
HP were right to turf that tub'o'lard!
On Bruce Perens Bio:
Among my assignments is to challenge HP management.
That's what he thought!
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
... he can do the "ask slashdot" now? Or is he bound by some NDA type stuff?
If more people thought this way, the world would really be more freer.
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
If HP is so threatened by a single person like Perens, they must really be in deep trouble. Apparently, The New HP is trying hard to become The New Unisys. Too bad--DEC and HP used to be nice companies. Compaq just keeps eating up one company after another, digesting them, well, and you know what comes out the other end.
What makes me nervous is that Microsoft might have threatened HP in some way as a partner. They obviously wouldn't want a partner promoting their product with internal factions insulting it. For that matter, HP 's argument might be that it's hard to sale your product, loaded with Windows, when you have vocal employees talking about security and usabiltiy problems.
Can I bum a sig?
That's what the bastard gets for placing me on his foes list! I must have said something that really pissed him off cause I'm there all alone with Klerck the crapflooder. In the immortal words of Nelson, HA-HA!
"You kill 2 birds with one stone. Increased stability + cost efficiency."
Where I work, stability and cost efficiency has nothing to do with our choice of OS. We need something that will run all those damned legacy apps we still have left over from the DOS 6.22 days. It's so much easier, it seems, to accomodate these old apps then to replace or upgrade them.
A lot of other big companies probably stay on Windows for the same reason.
psmylie's dictionary: Godzillion (noun) Any number large enough to destroy Tokyo
After it bought Compaq this year, the combined company became the largest single buyer of Windows for personal computers and data-serving computers, and thus more dependent on Microsoft.
I don't get it. If I moved from n to 1 on the list of a vendor's customers, why wouldn't I see increased leverage with my vendor? The story implies that being the number one customer of Microsoft is tantamount to losing leverage ("more dependant")?
It's a semantic argument to be sure, but regardless of what Bruce said about Microsoft you would think that they wouldn't want to damage their reputation with their number one customer, would you?
Or is this all about MS playing Dell and HP off each other?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Netscape 4 does not do that while the page is loading. The URL does flash up very briefly (too quick to be read), but then is wiped over by the status line that says how many bytes have been read at what rate. And big stories like this tend to have quite a lot of bytes and it takes a while to be loading them. And many people do know about middle-clicking on links to force a new window and get concurrent loading on 2 pages while they go get a refill on the coffee ... only to come back to see that nytimes.com wants a password. Basically, you have to wait until the page finishes loading to see the mouse-over URL because some nitwit programmer at Netscape in days gone by (Netscape 3 had the same stupidity) decided it was cool to overload different status messages in the same place.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
...Or just use the excellent random NTY registration generator and voila !
Enjoy,
-forged
Thanks for that.
But... you are being naive if you think the list you describe in your parody doesn't exist. I have been in meetings (not in the computer industry, but the principle is the same) where such things are discussed. Every successful business does indeed do that sort of thing. Given the threat that Linux poses to Microsoft's revenue stream, it would be foolish of them not to hold such discussions.
sPh
Now they fire a major advocate? Sounds like the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.
Major advocate or not, if the company and the individual do not see eye to eye, there seems little point in keeping the relationship going. They've reined Bruce in once already after his announcement about breaking DRM in conference - I'd say that was a good example of not seeing eye to eye.
Two things are clear here:
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
go to IBM.
MORTAR COMBAT!
>Where I work, stability and cost efficiency has
>nothing to do with our choice of OS. We need
>something that will run all those damned legacy
>apps we still have left over from the DOS 6.22
>days. It's so much easier, it seems, to accomodate
>these old apps then to replace or upgrade them.
>A lot of other big companies probably stay on
>Windows for the same reason.
OK, that's the client side, but you could still start turfing NT/2000 in your server room.
HP/Compaq (or Dell or IBM) would love to sell you some servers.
I'm not buying any HP products I can tell you that.
Carly will drive HP into the ground. Watch.
BC
then hp couldnt fire him in the middle of a lawsuit
Actually HP is in the services business.
From Bruce's web page it sounds like he is not hurting either way. So he could afford to go out on a limb. Obviously HPQ felt that his MS bashing was not in there best interests. As for it being all Compaq's fault. Doesn't John 'MadDog" Hall work for Compaq?
If he doesn't anymore, then he seems to play the game over their very well.
His leaving is described as "fired" and "officially a termination". I think to most people, "termination" implies that the company got rid of the employee.
The last two times I resigned from a job, the HR people, forms, etc. described the event as "termination". I find that interesting... going back over their records, I wonder if they see themselves as "terminating" 100% of the people who stop working there, even if 90% of the time it was the employee who decided to go elsewhere, not the employer getting rid of someone.
I've had better luck with Dosemu for running
DOS apps than with Windows.
Firstly, if HP decides to drop Linux, then his job is necessarily obsolete. In other words, it would be in his own best interest to keep Linux afloat at HP.
Secondly, his job was probably questionable at best, more PR than anything else, so his firing may very well have been inevitable. In other words, he had nothing to lose. In fact, he may have been fired, in actuality, because he was a waste of resources.
Thirdly, his longer term "career" prospects would almost certainly have been harmed if he had appeared anything less than a free software zealot (because he has staked this niche out as his bread and butter--just look at his resume).
Fourthly, maybe he cares for his popularity more (made almost exclusively through his position) than his job.
I, at least, don't see any reason to necessarily ascribe any noble purpose to this man, especially given the kinds of behavior that I've seen from him in the past. If a priest got fired from the Catholic church for maintaining and flaunting a theological position (esp. one that he was long associated with), then would you necessarily presume it was because he was principled or because he might have had some thing other in mind? The point is simply that just because he surrounds himself in something that is "not for profit" or "noble" does not make his own personal ends any more noble.
Good post. It shines some light on aspects I didn't bother developing, and it reinforces my main point.
It appears from this article that Bruce was terminated because of office politics. His visibility as an Open Source advocate probably played a major role, but I think the main reason is simple a power struggle between Old HP and Old Compaq.
At least, this news has all the signs of 'corporate power struggle' written all over it. Bruce just happens to be a highly publicised victim. Seeing as that Compaq appears to be winning, I don't think maddog will have to fear for his job.
Mart (who works in a merged corporation himself)"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
The short term gain (if you can even call it that) will be over shadowed by the ultimate demise or irrelevance in the market place of HP. As Bob Cringly put it a few months ago, after the merger the "shot clock" was reset until the board could fire her. The shot clock cannot count down fast enough. She has decimated an excellent engineering company.
On the day they fire her ass, and she pulls the rip chord on her golden parachute, HP will be irreversably damaged...
it is just sooo sad.
Yet another bad decision by HPQ's clueless management.
Technology companies become successful by creating innovative products with the best technology. Carly and co. has yet to grasp this concept.
-ted
After it bought Compaq this year, the combined company became the largest single buyer of Windows for personal computers and data-serving computers, and thus more dependent on Microsoft.
Is that really true?
I thought the United States Federal Government was the largest single buyer of Windows for personal computers and data-serving computers.
Am I wrong?
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Did anyone tell the new management that Perens job description was to be argumentative?
Bruce Perens leaving HP was reported in an Infoworld article on August 15. Although it is essentially the same story, the emphasis seems somewhat different. That article suggests that HP was restricting the level of activism, and Bruce would leave rather than put up with that. It does not mention Microsoft-baiting.
Note also that HP is cutting jobs at the moment; people who are given the boot get some money, those who walk don't. I would not read too much into "being fired" rather than "resigning" at the moment, it could just be a procedural device that Bruce goes as part of the cuts, so gets some money on the way out.
Using your analogy, the CIA's advisor would be a rabid muslim fanatic, pushing to convert the entire world to Islam from within the government.
Perens didn't exactly have a objective view.
Things have really change in the past year. After several years of corporate level Linux and OpenSource advocacy I now have CEOs *asking me* to implement Linux based solutions.
Ask me about my vow of silence!
So you based this *entire* project one one operating system? Not based on whether or not it does the job properly, with a minimum of downtime or hassle, but exclusively on whether or not it runs Linux?
You're fucked. Cash your chips in now while you still can. You have no business being in charge of the computing infrastructure of a company.
What a message it would send if IBM or similar pro-open source company immediately offered Bruce a job.
--------
It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
After it bought Compaq this year, the combined company became the largest single buyer of Windows for personal computers and data-serving computers, and thus more dependent on Microsoft
http://www.pcworld.com/resource/printable/article/ 0,aid,104016,00.asp
mailto:<?=implode("@", array("chris", implode(".", array("php", "net"))))?>
After it bought Compaq this year, the combined company became the largest single buyer of Windows for personal computers and data-serving computers, and thus more dependent on Microsoft.
Am I the only one who thinks this is just ass-backward from the way you'd expect things to be in an open market? So, HP/Compaq becomes MS's biggest customer. Back in the olden days, it would mean that *MS* would quake in fear and bend over backwards not to piss off their biggest client, lest they lose their business. Nowadays, it appears to mean that HP/Compaq needs to be careful lest they upset their vendor.
It's ridiculous. And, frankly, it should stop. Too bad short-term shareholder value has to take precedence over long-term strategic planning (like finding a way to get out from underneath MS's thumb).
After it bought Compaq this year, the combined company became the largest single buyer of Windows for personal computers and data-serving computers, and thus more dependent on Microsoft.
Funny, in a sane world you would think it would be the other way around.
This signature intentionally left blank
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
If the company is this short sighted, then he is better off working elsewhere. I am sure someone will hire him now having seen the publicity around this. Maybe he can get a job as a /. editor ;)
If anything, now he can go break the DMCA publically like he wanted to before HP put a stop to it.
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
HAHAHAH AHAhah aha ha hAHAHAha ha hah bruce is a l000000ser!
Look at the history of OpenMail, for example:
- When OpenMail was first released, they had a Windows NT version in the works. Microsoft told them to knife it because it would threaten Exchange. They did.
- When Linux became popular, OpenMail began another rise. It was about to become prominent again, and possibly threaten Exchange again. This time, Microsoft told them to kill the product completely on all platforms. And they did.
Now that Perens guy is a nuisance. He makes too much noise, so Microsoft told them to fire him. Of course, they did.I have no respect for a company that is such a pushover, and certainly no respect for a company so tightly bound to Microsoft.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
HP is probably a very important advertiser for Infoworld which would probably make them want to not publish to controversial articles against HP. Also the level of journalistic independence and tradition is probably much much lower in something like Infoworld compared to NYT.
Not based on whether or not it does the job properly, with a minimum of downtime or hassle, but exclusively on whether or not it runs Linux?
Whose to say that running Linux isn't necessary to do the job properly with a minimum of downtime and hassle? The parent poster was short on details, but I work in an environment where running Linux is a necessity (although I admit one of the BSDs would work just as well). We would _not_ buy a large (PC) cluster that would not run Linux, because all the apps we use are written for Unix. If they were pushing HP-UX, that might be a different matter, but I can think of plenty of reasons why he might insist on Linux.
Considering he bought a huge PC cluster, I'd imagine his applications are quite specific to Linux. Would you buy a machine for doing VB development if it didn't support Windows?
Phase 1. Force people to pay Microsoft tax.
Phase 2. ????
Phase 3. Profit!!!
Now if they sat down at the initial project meeting and listed 'Must run on Linux' in the requirements, that would just be idiocy.
Need I say more?
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
He did it on purpose. Come on. Look at it. Of course he did. He made a martyr out of himself so that he could get even *more* notariety and possibly a better paying job. I don't believe for a second that if he was actually doing something productive, that HP would have let him go, if he knows what he purports to know. My guess is that he did something stupid to get canned (on purpose), so that he'd be in the press. Everyone here, at least, gobbled it up. "Oh, poor Bruce!", "Bruce took one for the team", yadda, yadda, yadda. I bet that he's got a better severance package than most people here would ever get.
Isn't that why people should switch to Linux? "Minimum of downtime" has been associated with the word "Linux" for a reason. As for minimum of hassle, I suppose if it doesn't have nice big OK or Cancel buttons to click, then it's too big a hassle, neh? As for doing the job properly, it probably will. And if it doesn't, it's a simple matter of changing the code to suit their needs.
Everyone needs to realize that it's not possible to argue against Linux. It's malleable to the point of silliness...if it doesn't work exactly for you, you can fix it yourself or pay someone to fix it. What you pay depends on how many people in your organization are able to work on it (making a stab at getting back on topic). Having a Linux guru around benefits you, because that person can see how to fit Linux around the problems at hand, and can make it work. Having a Windows guru doesn't mean anything, because when the shit really hits the fan, the Windows guy can't fix it.
I work in PC marketing and I can tell you first hand that M$ dictates the relationship. They dictate advertising...M$ logo must be in the upper half of all ads, logo must be as big or bigger than your logo, you must say that Company XYZ "recommends M$ Windows XP Home edition." They do this a couple of ways. They establish very strong high level relationships within the company who are advocated for them. Also, they provide you with significant amounts of marketing funding. This allows you to advertise your products more and of course theirs at the same time.
Ruger
Would you like fries with that?
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
Well there's always the VA stock to fall back on. I suppose he could trade his shares for a can of soup somewhere...
After it bought Compaq this year, the combined company became the largest single buyer of Windows for personal computers and data-serving computers, and thus more dependent on Microsoft.
The logic of this is exquisitely twisted. Hp-Compaq is now by far Microsoft's biggest customer, so the logic goes, Microsoft has the most leverge over them.
Excuse me?
I think anybody who doesn't think that Microsoft's use of monopoly power needs to be severely restrained needs to think this one over. How can there be competition when companies fear a vendor so much they can't even flirt with the competition?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Does this not seem wrong to anyone else? Sense when does the supplier dictate the terms and not the largest customer? This, more than anything else I think, demonstrates that Microsoft has gone from being a viable solution for decent software to a company that needs to be reigned in.
The problem now, though, is that market forces will have to accomplish this. We already know that the government is incapable of stopping Microsoft from doing what it wants. Short of breaking the company into two or three parts, things will continue the way they are.
It's not possible to argue against Linux? Not to be an ass or anything, but FreeBSD is just as malleable as Linux, and has the bonus of not falling under the syphilis of software licenses.
Please cite examples where competent Windows administrators who kept up with Windows patches were stymied by a Windows problem that kept mission-critical systems down.
For every example you provide, counter-examples can be found for Linux. The VM upheaval in early 2.4 (so-called "stable" series). The ext2fs corruption in early 2.2 (once again, so-called "stable" series).
Anybody with blind faith to The One True Operating System doesn't understand very much about computing at all. Yes, Linux is malleable to the point of silliness, but why make a new hammer out of clay when Microsoft and IBM already have steel hammers that are have a much longer, and more proven, track record?
The Fortune 50 company I work for runs Sun Solaris on Sun hardware because it has a proven lower total cost of ownership, and also has proven to be more reliable than the Linux solutions we have tried.
------
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
Both HP and Compaq have ALWAYS been two-faced about Linux. It's OK to support both M$ and Linux, but for them to outright say that they're number one with Linux support, then come out and say they don't like Linux with a stupid move like this? Naah. Have a nice life, Carly. IBM is the REAL number one Linux supporter. (of the big companies, that is.)
People do just that, though, just like people list "Must run on Windows" as a requirement. It's stupid then, too.
Perhaps they wanted a huge PC cluster because that's still the only way Linux scales with any degree of success. People are great at customizing the question to the answer they want to give.
...that he kept pestering Carly to change the company name to GNU/HP
---
Information wants...you to shut your pie hole.
If all of our advertisements were like this, I don't think I'd even bother with blocking popups.
Now, I must go buy something at random.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
For that matter, HP 's argument might be that it's hard to sale your product, loaded with Windows, when you have vocal employees talking about security and usabiltiy problems.
Microsoft doesn't seem to have a problem with one of its own doing the same.
My spoon is too big.
"A corporation has no soul to damn and no body to kick" (variously "kill", "punish").
This comes from the Baron Thurlow, the Lord Chancellor of England in the 1700's and as far as I can tell (http://www.xrefer.com) the full and correct quote is :
"Corporations have neither bodies to be punished, nor souls to be condemned, they therefore do as they like."
Or you might prefer this from Ambrose Bierce :
"Corporation: an ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility."
More at http://www.endgame.org/primer-quotes.html. These quotes (naturally) apply to HP, to MS, to Dell, Red Hat and so on
Example:
http://www.co-operativebank.co.uk/
HTH.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Bruce got caught in office politics, where several managers thought his stance on open source threatened their agenda with Windows. It's one thing I like about running a small company: we don't have a problem determining the difference between corporate goals and personal goals. They are one and the same right now.
Hire a manager, however, and you suddenly introduce another variable. Is *his* agenda the same as yours? Or does he want to cultivate contacts while being paid by you so that he can go out on his own in 2 years?
Everyone in a corporation has an agenda and it's surprising how often those agendas don't conform to what would be good for the corporation that pays them. In this case I'm pretty sure HP/Compaq will live to regret firing Bruce.
Our company hasn't bought (or even recommended) a Compaq or an HP in years. We recommend Dell almost exclusively (even if we don't get a dime out of it) because we think boxes from Dell offer the best value for our clients. This may change in the future to HP, but somehow I doubt it.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
The various BSDs have a reputation for being harder to install and less easy to use. And running even less commercial software. I don't know whether this is true or not, but that's the reputation.
... Remember, nobody buys a machine that comes with *BSD Unix pre-installed.)
(Sort of like Debian, with less compatibility.)
If you want to compete, that's where you need work. (I think I remember that KDE or Gnome was ported to a BSD, so the technical problem that is most likely to need fixing is the installer
This may be as much a PR problem as anything else, I wouldn't know. But the Linux system said to be most similar to the BSDs is Gentoo, which is one of the ubergeek distributions. Not where you want to be if you are aiming at the popular market.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
If HP is now the largest vendor of preinstalled MS OS's, then clearly MS needs HP more than HP needs MS.
It's a crazy company that lets a vendor dictate their policies rather than respond to client needs/wants.
Back in Winter of 2001 I was volunteering for themse.org and as a part of that volunteer work a few staff members and such got to goto LinuxWorld in NYC...
Well, it was the last day of the damn event and I was looking for a cab to the airport (from the Javits Center) and so was Bruce... I didn't propose to "share" a cab or anything with the guy, but this limo driver I was talking to said it's cheaper for 2 people to share a limo than a single person in a taxi. So he saw Bruce and asked him if he was going to the airport.
He said yes, and explained what he was trying to do... so Bruce and I were walking towards the Limo when he starts throwing a fit about me, a 19 year old linux community volunteer, having to share the limo with him. He was rude, and downright stuck up. He marched off and got in a cab.
Well, that was ok, because some guy from Caldera was willing to share a limo fare with me to the airport. He was the VP of technology or something.. not sure.. but we had a nice little conversation.
Anyway, to make a long story short, this Bruce Perens guy is a dick and a half...
Sig rhymes with Fig
I refuse to go to ANY site that requires registration, paid or not.
Somebody give me a better link, please, one to a less spammy paper.
Maybe we should have a category, +1: Important. Because his post is important exactly because the whole damn article is about him. I certainly think that any of his posts are important to the discussion.
Mad Software: Rantings on Developing So
If you were about to hire somebody to maintain your own branch of the Linux kernel to solve all the world's problems and Linux's shortcomings, I think that "ease of use and install" is probably not a concern for you.
You can come back to the grownups' table when you have a point to make that's germane to the conversation at hand.
... let's all stand up.
sulli
RTFJ.
NYT sux. Period. Don't link that awful rag, especially without warning.
Thx for the post, now I can see wtf you guys are arguing about.
Yeah, that's what it looks like from here at the new company I work for. We were a fairly well run, cohesive unit with respected products and a large market share. Then we merged. Large company politics now seem more important than either the customers or the products. And our stock price shows it! :-(
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
To the Redmond Moderators who pushed this to +4. "Syphilis of software licenses"? "A new hammer out of clay"? No mention of viruses, worms, late patches or licensing costs? Please cite examples where "competent" Linux administrators put 2.2 or 2.4 into production use the moment they were released. Ahhh, the power of a qualifier.
"the combined company became the largest single buyer of Windows for personal computers and data-serving computers"
Tail wags dog? Who is paying whom here?
HP seems to be filled with the spineless. If they are MS's biggest customer, its seems they should have clout with MS, not the other way around.
The only thing worse than a coward is a retarded coward.
I know I say it just about every time I see you post here; but thank you so much for looking out for people who don't care. It's a daunting task, at best, just know that there are several million (a minority, for sure) of us that truely appreciate everything you've done for us and the OSS movement(considering we'd be calling it something else without you).
;)
You are the level-headed balance between sometimes feuding, always ranting zealots.
On a side note: I made my neighbor watch RevolutionOS with me and I think she's got the hots for ya!
You take care of yourself now, and don't be a stranger.
put the what in the where?
Maddog left Compaq a while back to join VA. When VA crashed, Maddog left their payroll. As a spokesperson for Linux International, he's had funding from a variety of sources, including, notably, IBM. But, just like Bruce, he's happy to consider opportunities to help companies with their Linux strategy or just to understand what Linux could mean to them.
Linux International
What's up with that? Do I need to submit my own story when I get fired somewhere?
So basically you're saying that it's acceptable for Linux's "stable" branch to be unstable and for it to frequently introduce catastrophic bugs and instability because, after all, everyone knows better than to expect it to be stable and deployable?
That's a rather forgiving and rose-coloured perspective.
And before you ask, those other parties like the greens are cool, but they don't win many elections.
with that attitude they never will. you know why alot of people dont use linux? because there most people dont use linux. the follow the hurd justification is kind of a self defeating argument.
really though if you agree with the greens you should vote for them. vote for the people you want to win, dont vote against the people you want to loose. otherwise we will continue to have the one party system masquerading as a two party system.
you know bruce, for the most part i think you're a pretty cool guy. vote with your conscience.
-- john
My point exactly. Any posts made by him are certainly relevant to the topic, but they are not necessarily insightful or informative.
The crack that I made about the "+1: Bruce Perens" mod category is due to the annoying tendency of people on this site to mod people up or down according to who they are, and not necessarily what they have to say in any given post. I mean, Bruce Perens could post a link to goatse.cx (not that I think he'd ever do that, of course) and it'd get moderated into the stratosphere, just because he's Bruce Perens.
Again, not to take anything away from the guy, but modding every post of his up, regardless of content or importance, is simply a misuse (or abuse, if you care to see it that way) of the system, IMHO.
Yesterday, Carly Fiorina, CEO of Hewlett-Packard, came out in support of the 1633 house arrest of Galileo Galilei during an address to industry executives.
"Pope Urban the Eighth had every right to do this.", Ms. Fiorina exclaimed. "Mr. Galilei knew that this 'Sun belongs in the Center' heresy was dangerous stuff and he should have known better than to go around spouting off about it. If I were Pope, I would have canned his ass much, much sooner."
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
Bear in mind that I use 100% Linux, then I tell you that you missed the ball once, twice, thrice; now take your bat back to the bench with you.
Their opening screen is very pretty, too.
The point is, customers don't install their own stuff, and for a systems integrator to install once and clone many times is not hard. Mandrake Linux is generally easier to install than Windows, but 99% of people simply don't install their own software - wouldn't try, even with a zero questions wipe-and-restart rescue CD - so it wouldn't make any practical difference whether you had to interpret and punch in big strings of hex without benefit of a backspace key, or the installer AI read your mind and turned your wishes into something bootable while you slept.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Valerie hates the DC weather (she's comparing it to Northern California)
The weather in D.C. is even worse than that. Hot, humid summers and cold (for a "Southern city") winters. Nice place to visit, but I'll never live there again.
Is not a legal one where I live. "A right to work state"
Get a free ipod.
How about where a patch that needed to be installed to fix one particular bug, took away the functionality that was necessisary in another part of the application? I've had several clients who were stuck on a particular version of NT (bug infested and a security nightmare) because they could not get the security patches installed w/out the patches breaking their application.
In these cases, it didn't matter whether the admins were competant or not. Microsoft forced them to either:
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
Another example of ongoing Windows instability was the IIS 4 server on NT 4, which leaked memory something horrible when ASP was used, resulting in busy sites needing to restart services and/or reboot servers every few hours in order to keep websites running. For some time, Microsoft ran a private mailing list ("ASPPrivate", iirc) for users experiencing this problem - mostly large website customers. I'm not sure when this was fixed, if ever - I think that Win2K and IIS5 came out before the problem was ever fixed on IIS4, and Microsoft's strategy for addressing customer concerns was simply to stall for many months and then tell customers to upgrade their OS.
Anyone who tries to hold up Microsoft OSes as comparable to Linux, or any Unix variant, in terms of stability and reliability, probably has no experience of *nix, stability, or reliability.
Another issue, perhaps not as major, is uptime. Windows still requires reboots if you look at it funny - even 2000 and XP. At sites I deal with that have a mixed server population, I regularly see *nix servers with uptimes in the hundreds of days, where the Win servers are lucky to have a couple of months of uptime.
Don't you have a civics class to go to, or something? No, as bad as your writing is, it must be English you're skipping.
Go away, little one. It's time for the grown-ups to talk.
P.S. Here's a hint and a half for that little pimple you pee from, take some english classes.
Sorry, corporations are responsible to their shareholders.
They are legally restrained from causing damage to other, just like an individual.
But really a company should only report to its owners. My dog shouldn't go bite anyone, but it is mine, and has no moral obligation to make your world better.
When it is your money, you can give it away, but don't rant about how I should give mine away.
If you shove your head any farther up his ass, you're going to hit his colon, you tool.
Lots of companies base projects on one operating system. The difference is that the operating system is usually Windows. The fact of the matter is the network infrastructure is becoming a commodity. You can bet that the company in question spent their half million on a capable Linux-compatible solution, they just purchased it from someone other than HP. And since Linux is so standards compliant you can bet that this solution would also work with Windows, or any other operating system you can think of.
The days when infrastructure solutions can afford to be "Windows-only" are quickly coming to an end. There are simply too many folks that are realizing the tremendous cost savings of Linux.
Sounds like everyone is again looking to make this overly complicated.
The guy makes very vocal, occasionally unprofessional comments about a product on HPs line card. After multiple warnings he keeps on doing it. Ultimately they have no choice but to can him.
I'd expect them to do the same if any of their windows people made vocal, inflamatory comments about linux.
Suck it up people, he screwed up.
Okay, so HP gave 'us' lots of different printer stuff. But they fired Bruce (I thought he quit, but, whatever...) So does that mean we buy HP printers because they don't suck and because they gave back to the community, or do we boycott them in a show of solidarity?
Can't speak for anyone else, but they make a good product, so I'll still be buying the printers. And registering with a note indicating my OS is "Linux and I'm pissed at what you did to/with Perens".
But I'll buy drill and fill toner, so that should even things out.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Okay, then, what should they have bought? I'm assuming they bought a Linux cluster because, like many of us, they wanted to use commodity PC hardware rather than some expensive system proprietary to HP. Personally, for half a million I'd have wanted a nice big SGI Origin system, but most of the people I work for/with are dead-set on buying PC clusters. Which means Linux in virtually every case. (How much PC hardware is supported on *BSD but not Linux, out of curiosity?)
Honestly, I don't understand what's so bad about insisting on Linux. I don't hold it against large companies that they insist on Windows every time they buy business desktops. And since the poster already said they'd bought one Linux cluster, why should they buy another product that would be incompatible? Your responses indicate that you're even less qualified to make these types of decisions than you accuse the AC of being.
Have you seen dosemu? Works pretty good.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I was starting to read that, then decided to skip it. The New York Times has to pay a copy writer to write these stories that slashdot merely links to. All they ask in return is for a registration, and it's free, for christs sake.
I was just ranting and raving to myself this morning about how corporate america is turning us into sharecropping wage slaves, but the people who are really trying to force others to produce for them without fair renumeration are the leeches who repost copyrighted data. No, I don't think you should be locked up in a cage for it like Disney and Adobe would prefer it, but at the very least, you should be ashamed of yourself. tangentially, I still love gnutella and use it for some music (not really an en masse scale), but the RIAA declared war on its own customers. It's a pretty paltry justification, but my point is, are you ready to say the NYT deserves the same treatment? They're not saints by any means, but copy writers have to eat too.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
but why make a new hammer out of clay when Microsoft and IBM already have steel hammers that are have a much longer, and more proven, track record?
1. AIX is an expensive proposition, and it's supposed to be pretty weird to use. Expertise is much harder to come by. The Power systems are apparently very good, but they're not for everyone.
2. Microsoft's products do not have a very good track record, and Microsoft's record in the server business is one of the shortest. NT was only released in '94, right, and didn't really catch on until '96 with NT 4.
3. Many people have applications that they need to run under Unix. I'm one of them. Linux suits our purposes fine, and has been more stable on our servers than Windows on our desktops. I would love to have a Power4 or Origin system to play with- they'd run all our apps without a problem- but my boss insists on PC hardware wherever possible. FreeBSD may be good, but it is less "standard"- i.e. is not what most people in our field use.
I work in bioinformatics, and no one in bioinformatics uses Windows for real work, thank god. Almost everyone in our group has Windows on their desktop, sure, but all programming and calculations are done under Linux. Expensive proprietary Unix systems are common, but us academic types can't always afford the latest greatest 16-processor RISC box. Windows does not have a tenth the capabilities and flexibility of Unix for our applications.
And frankly, we don't give a shit about the GPL. We're scientists, not ideologues, and all we care about is that Linux is free and it works.
For the most part, you're right. However, many companies end up with large management infrastructures designed for one platform or another. Also, IT departments tend to be trained on a handful of platforms. For every additional platform a company is required to support, significant additional cost may be incurred. For example, perhaps the poster's company already has all of its web apps running on an Apache/PHP/Linux platform. They may have decided that it does not make sense to support an additional platform for their n'th web app. In this case, a requirement of "must run on Linux" might be more reasonable.
BRENT ROCKWOOD, EST'd 1975
Going by your statements, I'd still say it's impossible to argue against Linux. Your counter-examples are simply facts of software design. Bugs happen and software evolves over time. The VM change wasn't forced upon you was it? Worst comes to worst, you still have whatever kernel you were using before, and a host of tools that still work with it, not to mention all of the source code for it. Under Windows, you're just at the mercy of whatever license agreement you're under, irregardless of whether the software works right or not.
Bugs are a fact of software development. Bugs make it into stable systems. Naming one bug that's already been fixed in Linux doesn't justify your argument, for there were 19 in IE alone, last time I checked. MS doesn't doesn't fix all their bugs, period. I would agree that their track record is proven, but if they haven't got their act together by now, they never will.
You might also have noticed that Linux or otherwise open source type projects don't have that many show-stopping bugs anymore, they're mostly security type bugs and obscure buffer overflows. They're getting better. Windows adds new features and improves the UI, but they don't fix a problem unless the PR is bad or the cost is low. There are bugs still floating around in Windows that I doubt will ever be fixed. While Linux gets better, Windows stays the same.
Finally, anyone who would install an OS that might shut itself down because it thinks it's pirated into a mission critical situation deserves what's coming to them.
>Using your analogy, the CIA's advisor would be a rabid muslim fanatic, pushing to convert the entire world to Islam from within the government
If you can keep the guy under control, this would be more valuable to the government than a true sympathiser.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Where I work, stability and cost efficiency has nothing to do with our choice of OS. We need something that will run all those damned legacy apps we still have left over from the DOS 6.22 days. It's so much easier, it seems, to accomodate these old apps then to replace or upgrade them.
A lot of other big companies probably stay on Windows for the same reason.
So are you using FreeDOS?
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
How different is the atmosphere now compared to last February at Linuxworldexpo where Carly Fiorina gave a good and persuasive endorsement of Linux and the HP commitment to the platform.
Her presentation included mention of the fact that HP was in search of capable Linux technicians, and as I have my own small consulting business, had intended to contact her, and you directly with regard to that requirement.
I'm nowhere close to your level of insight into Linux internals, but I've been running various distros and versions exclusively here since 1999, when it was recommended to me by IBM.
Current research includes, but is not limited to, the Linux Corporate Desktop initative. With efforts like these, and the growth of Linux in general, I suppose, allies are important.
HP strongly backing Linux, with you there to give guidance represented an example of that. There's something troubling about the message their new direction (or lack thereof?) sends.
I recognize with appreciation the work you put in at HP and wish you much future success
and someday we may be destined to work together yet.
give me a
Do you ever try Windows solutions anymore? :)
Did anyone else notice that sincerechoice.org displays correctly in Internet Explorer but not in Mozilla?
There's nothing wrong with saying "Windows Sucks." Afterall Linus has been saying it for years.
"Maybe we should have a category, +1: Important. Because his post is important exactly because the whole damn article is about him. I certainly think that any of his posts are important to the discussion. "
Excellent idea. And more general than +1: Bruce Perens. Could be used for others, say Larry Wall in a Larry Wall interview, anything where the commentor's comment is directly related to the story to the point of almost being a continuation or a part.
Linus doesn't work for a Windows reseller.
The box that took over? A p2/300 with linux 2.2, 128mb ram and ide drives. Ran for months at a time doing mail, web, dns. Never hit swap, never crashed, never needed to be babysat. We had more serious hardware, but never bothered migrating because it just wasn't needed.
Oh and btw, linux is free. HELLO?!
Bruce Perens disclosed Thursday that he is planning to leave the company in order to become more politically active he said. So is he an activist putting his money where his mouth is or a holy martyr killed by the faceless corporation? You can't have it both ways. Hopefully Bruce was smart enough to get a good job first or that 2 year old kid might be getting hungry soon. It's a crappy market to be all principled and shit. Yeah your emperor has no clothes, mod me down again.
bamph
I'll keep my eyes out on the grocery shelves for this one. The cans of Impostor Perens I've been buying don't make very good sandwiches.
And why not one of the BSDs? They're so much easier to adminisiter, which is exactly why we're switching to *BSD here.
I actually used gentoo. It takes a long time to get up and installed. Perhaps one of the biggest problems is that you're wasting billions of CPU cycles compiling things one that have been compiled before on similar hardware. I mean, really, how many unique Athlon 2100's are there in the world?
/etc or rpm -qa on SuSE? It's a joke since they're replacing the ./configure --with-such-and-such && make all process, with an installer called "emerge" that's just as magical as rpm.
People say that this is the first system they know what's really going on. Wow. Have they ever tried doing an ls -al on
If you want something that's not set up automatically by the ebuild, you still have to modify it, just like you have to with an rpm spec file -- only without the nice database of file attributes that rpm keeps for you.
This is utter garbage. *BSDs are much easier to configure and manage. Which is exactly why we're switching from Linux to FreeBSD. I am sick of hard to do upgrades for the OS and its components. With *BSDs it's cvsup, make buildworld, installworld, modify config files, and done.
He's right. Shouldn't HP have leverage over Microsoft?
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
What is the algorithm to upgrade a Linux distro to a new version?
Here's the algorithm for FreeBSD: cvsup, make world, edit configs, reboot. I choose *BSD for easier administration, and Linux where I can't use a BSD.
Now microsoft can say for sure, that "People get fired for using Open Source"
or maybe because the price/performance of commodity pc hardware for any task that can reasonably run on the platform is about 2-3 times that of the nearest competition? Google doesn't run on commodity pc hardware because thats what they like, they run on it because they have a need for thousands of processors at multiple sites with a minimum of cost.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
In some bibles they hilite the words that God spoke in red.
Are we sure this was the "Real Bruce Perens" - check his employee number to be sure.
(play on his old sig)
I've followed Bruce's public actions since the early days of Debian when he was very active in that community. I have loads of respect for his consistency in his views.
/. that correspond to our "digital rights" and is always the first one to come to the defense of the people he disagrees with if they are being unfairly "bashed".
... hip ... Hooray!
He is always willing to "get in on" the conversations on
Three cheers for Bruce!
Hip
It was on slashdot at least, but that doesn't make it true
However, since the founders died, the company looks to have been taken over by managers who are primarily interested in their paycheck, not the well being of the company. For example, one of the driving factors behind the Compaq merger was the fact that Carly got a $70 Million bonus check if the merger went through. Lord knows what she would have earned had the Price-Waterhouse acquisition taken place.
The corporate logo "HP Invent," alludes to an inventive spirit at HP but unfortunately, that spirit is the spirit of HP-past. I've seen exactly one interesting idea come out of HP in the past 2 years and that was a cooling device - not something that'll generate billions in sales. Carly was a History major at Stanford so she's obviously got some smarts. But they're the wrong kind - she doesn't have the technological background to recognize really good technical ideas when she sees them and so must rely on her staff to evaluate them for her. The inevitable "what does she want to hear?" filtering takes place and in that process and HP is all the poorer for it.
The next time the HP board goes looking for a new CEO (like in the next 18 months maybe...), hopefully they'll choose someone who not only has some sales smarts but is also technologically competent. And perhaps, if they've learned anything, the compensation plan will reflect the CEO's effect on HP's bottom line, not how many pointless mergers the CEO steers the company through.
Sometimes you just have to hold on to people who know the emerging markets, even if they do not share the same ideology.
True, but lots of corporations don't believe this. Profit in modern corporations is like God in organized religion. Large corporations say they're about Profit, but they are really about maintaining the corporate culture. Anyone who isn't a true believer must go.
The corporation I worked for was, for the most part, staffed at the line-management level with mindless functionaries. We would piss away hundreds if not thousands of dollars every week for the sake of doing things the company way. We'd bend over forward time after time after time to accomodate repeat customers who were losing us money by the continued presence of their job in the store. Why? Because corporate culture demands not profit, but accomodation and competition. Don't piss anyone off! Don't let them go to the other company! If it were about profit, we would have sent these problem customers to the competiton. They could have crippled our competition in no time at all.
(I'm not pro-profit in any big way, but I do think that a genuine profit motive makes a company a better member of its community than corporate culturalism, by way of ordinary free-market forces. I think it's sad that ruthless profit-mindedness would actually improve the current situation.)
Or look at election workers. I saw some on television the other day after local primaries and they were jumping up and down like little kids because their candidate won. That wasn't about believing in and striving for an ideal, or doing an important job; that was about Our candidate won! Yay!
I feel that over time, this culturalism percolates to higher and higher levels in any given social structure. Without some kind of check against culture becoming the end instead of the means, soon the entire institution in question is run by these tribal idiots. At this point, the people serve the culture instead of the culture serving the people.
Ellen
mods metamodded as "Unfair"
to the article or another news source that can confirm this? The link above doesn't work, it redirects to a spam registration page.
I guess the next thing we are going to see is HP become a Zenith and fire all of their engieers and just market cheap off shore junk.
That's not an advantage, that's a disadvantage. I refuse to contribute to something where the changes may be stolen from me, then sold back to me. Sorry.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Libertarians are FAR closer to Republicans than they are to Greens or Democrats
Libertarians can be social, economic or both. A true libertarian would be both and believes in equality of opportunity *both* socially and economically. A true libertarian is Darwinian. These are anti-capitalistic, since capital is a lever of ability, not a measure of it.
Greens (and Democrats) are socially liberal but economically centrist, as such are only half way off a true Libertarian on one axis, the economic, and very similar on the alternate social axis.
Republicans are socially conservative or even authoritarian; this is at least half off the social axis. Republicans promote the status quo, are anti-progressive, pro-capitalistic and pro-monopolistic, again at least half way off a true libertarian.
Therefore Green and Democrat are certainly closer to a true libertarian than republicans.
You are correct that Linux has better support for crappy hardware like $9 tape drives. This, I suppose, is vitally important for you if your data is worth $9.
Hey, they're Frites and they come from Belgium. Double-fried in beef fat, with mayonaise. I guess the US soldiers were a bit confused as to which country they were liberating at the time.
I'll avoid the McDonalds version (fried air and flour with a little bit of potato) and stick to the not-very-healthy-but-still-less-saturated- than-the-belgian-version called chips; british or irish potatoes in vegetable oil with salt and vinager. Yummy.
Yeah, that's what it looks like from here at the new company I work for. We were a fairly well run, cohesive unit with respected products and a large market share. Then we merged. Large company politics now seem more important than either the customers or the products. And our stock price shows it!
Large-scale tech mergers almost never do well. It must be about territory ego than about money, because the industry keeps making this same mistake over and over again.
Table-ized A.I.
Uh...if you don't make your changes available (no requirement to), there's little chance of your changes being stolen from you.
Thanks for playing. I'd give you a consolation prize, but, frankly, you don't deserve one.
Bruce's website is very interesting.... especially his bio/resume. I can understand having an inflated ego after all that a man like Bruce has accomplished, but to put that crap up on the internet and tell the population at large that you basically invented open source, the internet and life as we know it... I have less respect for this man. It's not that I don't believe him, it's that he makes himself sound like God.
Unless Bruce and whoever was responsible for firing him both speak out, we'll never know all the reasons for letting him go (and we'd need both sides of the story...
It could be that he got canned for surfing slashdot all day.
Table-ized A.I.
How about (+1, informed)?
It implies less that the post has really informing content, and implies more that the things this person says on the subject are crucial becuase they are in such a position that we know what they have to say is accurate.
Perhaps (+1, definitive)? We could also use that one to mod up in those cases where the slashdot blurb is completely dead wrong, and that first person to say "What? Read the article, that isn't what it says at all." gets voted up to 5...
--super ugly ultraman
Another high power corporatrix that can't resist geek meat.
Funny, we used this same combination of IIS 4 and Windows NT 4 with ASP. We did not see this problem.
Maybe our traffic was not as large.
Sure there are a lot of service packs, plus the security rollup.
The warning and patch for IIS 4.0 was ready at least a month before code red came out.
However Windows 2000 laptops were another matter.
Many of these users did not even know they were running IIS.
Those got infected.
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." -- Albert Einstein
Why should owning a share of stock relieve someone of all moral responsibility? If I make a buck by killing babies and selling the tanned hides as lampshades, that's just plain wrong. If I own a share of stock in a company that makes money for its shareholders in the same way, I am just as responsible. A corporation shouldn't be held to less strict standards than an individual.
Serving your airship needs since 1995.
apt-get dist-upgrade
I like both quotes.
The first one though, may be changing. Hopefully we'll see some corporate accountability if the execs from Worldcom, Adelphia, et al are convicted and get nice long prison sentences or very large fines.
No, they get stolen from me when some company grabs the changes for themselves, incorporates them into a product that has their own, special, 'proprietary' changes in them, then sells them back to me.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
There's still plenty of other [more useful] Linux guys around here...
Maybe it's just me [trollbait] but I'll take a linux developer who works on HP's own products over a talking head who maintains open source. I'm sure he's useful to the community, I'm not saying he's not. But useful to HP? That's debatable.
Opinions are my own and not those of my employer...
-anonymous HP engineer
Argue with your deeds, not with your mouth. You were an employee, "won't bite the partners" clause was in your contract, you were warned several times. With all due respect, I have to ask: what kind of the dumb punk are you? You aren't the God, nor are you HPQ owner or major shareholder. Who are you to bite one of their biggest partnes? Linux advocate? Aw, come on, nobody gives a shit about Linux advocacy. NOBODY in the business world, that is. What people do give shit about is real solutions, because they speak for themselves. ESR, RS, Perens - who gives a shit, they talk too much.
*
So you have competitors breaking into your systems and stealing code that you store on your internal servers?
Sounds like you have problems that even the GPL can't solve. Perhaps you should fire your networking staff and replace them with people with more experience than having installed Linux on a 486.
Even after this:0 7/26/17 39207&mode=thread&tid=153
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/
LOL. He should have gone through with it.
I went to college with a guy named Bruce Perens. I've oftened wondered if this Bruce is the same guy (sometimes it sure sounds like it!). If it is the same Bruce I can totally understand why they fired him, he was very good at taking credit for other people's work while bad-mouthing them.
Not much of a contributor, not much of a team player, but great at taking credit for things other's did while talking lots of trash.
I really hope this isn't the same guy!
Nope, they stole the code I put up on a public archive server. They took it from me without giving me anything in return. The GPL requires that if they add anything to it, they give it back to me. A much fairer exchange.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Did somebody hold a gun to your head and make you upload your BSD-licensed code to a public archive server?
Nobody did?
Then shut the fuck up. Your point is irrelevant.
A half million dollars of non-pc buys you an 8 way box and no support. That linux cluster probably dusts a failover pair 24 way boxes.
I saw the note on his page about not being with HP anymore at least a week ago I think. More power to him....HP/CPQ service sucks, thier field tech's are some of the least trained, most clueless workers I've ever had to let in my lab. I refuse to allow the HP desktop guys to even touch our stuff unless they are going to blackbox the entire unit, otherwise we force them to leave us parts and pick up spares.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
You are mistaken. The GPL does not require this.
no clustering. and maybe they're dual CPU boxes. or need support for specific raid or ups that isn't available.
What will these troll think of next ?
Debian doesn't build the world for you. I find cvssing down the build tree far more easier that apt. I've used Debian for a couple of years, and loved it, until I found out just how easier it is with *BSD. Cheers.
The fact of the matter is that the merger between HP and Compaq has been very little about improving the companies and almost completely about politics. (Disclaimer) I am / was an HP employee that has been "impacted" by the workforce reduction program. But my three primary references are co-workers from my old group, so I'm not the only one that thinks it was a stupid decision. (/Disclaimer) This is actually a somewhat off-topic post, because I'd hope that Bruce's situation was reviewed very carefully by the Executive Council (considering his high visibility), but I'll throw it out there anyway.
Most of the decisions that are being made are second guessed to the Nth degree. What usually winds up happening is that some completely frustrated upper manager has to make a decision that is based on how well someone can argue (or create a lovely PowerPoint presentation that can be transmitted nicely via NetMeeting). The person making the decision usually has no personal insight into the situation and often doesn't even know the people that are submitting the arguments.
The really funny thing is that while The New HP is trying to keep "top talent", this method of decision making is actually ensuring that the people that spend all of their time in meetings (where the big decision is usually about when to have the next meeting) are kept while the people that actually get things done are dumped. So while the company tries to position itself as an open source advocate (by firing Bruce) and as working to create a world class engineering company (by putting people that can't write code, etc. in engineering based decision making positions) they are actually just...Microsoft without the market share.
Anyway, good post Mart. You hit pretty close to the mark, I think. This isn't about business - it is about making the executives richer than they already are. But don't worry - they love that company...today.
Chris
He meant that, compared to Northern California, the D.C. weather sucks; not that they were "comparable".
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
She's not a one-issue rep, is she? Yessireebob, she surely represents all of the people. It would be real shame to have someone like yourself who may be wrong but is still five times as smart as her....
Bullshit. How the hell do you know how many people the world can support? Before the industrial revolution, the world was thought to be too overcrowded, and that mass starvation would ensue. Turns out that the IR created distribution systems that alleviated the problem incredibly. Who's to say that we can't fix the current problems? Most of the resource issues that are involved with population are political. And we've passed the inflection point of population growth. The world's population is still growing, but not as fast as it used to.
Southern city my ass.... I'm from the Deep South where you're a yank if you're north of I-10.
Just drop the 'tech' part of that statement. I work in financials, so I get to see a lot of the numbers, and it seems any large merger is fraught with difficulties.
A few examples:
I tend to concentrate on European markets, but I'm quite sure someone can give more U.S. examples.
Funnily enough, my own employer is relatively free of these kind of shenanigans.
Mart"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
Utter garbage. There's nothing preventing BSD from clustering. MPI software runs on *BSD. Even MOSIX was originally built for FreeBSD. Get your facts straight before spewing disinfo into slashdot. Idiot.
You are mistaken. The GPL does not require [those who modify the software to distribute their changes].
Look at it in context. Omnifarious specified: "then sold back to me." If you distribute GPL binaries compiled from source code you got from somebody else and subsequently modified, you have to distribute either source code or an offer to give anybody the source code at cost.
Will I retire or break 10K?
err...transmeta has a windows partner program wiht m$ to ensure their CPUs work properly with win32.
funny, my experience was the exact opposite. I used FreeBSD and NetBSD for awhile before going to Debian for exactly the same reason... ah well..
Southern city my ass.... I'm from the Deep South where you're a yank if you're north of I-10.
:)
Well, that's the funny thing. Everyone North of D.C. considers it to be in the South, and everyone South of D.C. considers it to be North.
You may well be correct, but that's not the common impression, which was my point.
Now since the context was "Not possible to argue against Linux..", you have a point. You definitely find it easy. But the question is, I suppose, "with who?" If we are considering normal windows users (which was the context I read this as), then ease of use is a paramount consideration. At every step along the way. And to me that probably means Mandrake, perhaps even a WalMart pre-installed Mandrake. Not the one I use, but then I'm not a part of what I heard the target audience to be.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Funny. Compaq (now HP) is running large ads in the trade press touting that they were the first major company to support Linux and Open Source.
Now they fire a major advocate? Sounds like the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.
Does being a Linux advocate make him the best person for the job? Does supporting Linux mean employing Linux advocates even at the expense of other parts of you company? There is a world of difference between supporting Linux and open source and bashing MS. The feel Bruce is bashing MS and that may (or is) causing them problems. They can still support Linux and open source without Bruce around, and not have to worry about the potential for problems with MS.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
No, and my original point was that I refuse to contribute to BSD because I don't want my contributions stolen and then sold back to me. So, if you have no better arguments than that, I think my point is made.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Your contributions aren't "stolen" under the BSD license. You give them away with the full knowledge that people have the ability to make changes to them and sell the resulting binaries, keeping the source private.
It's a matter of choice. It's a freedom that the BSD license provides that the GPL doesn't.
So, going back up thirty levels to an original post, it's this bit of flexibility that FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, etc. have that Linux doesn't.
It's only theft if it isn't consensual.
The location of DC was chosen deliberately for that reason. It was placed right smack on the border between two states, one part of the northern culture and one part of the southern, on land carved out to belong to neither. This was supposed to indicate that it was on neutral ground and not biased to any one region. Even back then before the civil war, the undercurrents of disagreement between north and south were obvious to all.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Hey! Be carefully Jeremy Allison and Gerald Carter...HPQ is loving M$ and M$ doesn't love SAMBA...ummm....maybe Mr. Capellas is take a strong piece of the cake...
They're so much easier to adminisiter
What?? How?
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HP used to be a pretty well run company. Let's see what Fiorina managed to do:
* Axe the world-renowned calculator development people.
* Merge with a company bleeding money based in an industry (high margin desktop PCs) that's bleeding money -- *and* an area that HP was trying to extract itself from.
* Not get any criticism, because God knows she's a woman, *the* female tech CEO, and it would be hideous to actually bash someone that "broke the glass ceiling". Grrr.
It just pisses me off. There are *tons* of smart engineers at HP, and they're getting completely screwed over because they have idiotic upper management.
All these moves either get Fiorina huge bonuses (like the merger) or give short term cost benefits (like killing the calculator dev group) at the cost of serious long term damage. Yes, the shareholders will be happy -- for a short period of time.
May we never see th
Disclaimer: Although I work for HP, these are my personal views and not those of my company.
Linux commoditizes the operating system. HP recognizes it. Everyone recognizes it. HP intends to capitalize on it and make some money. Many HP engineers use linux on a daily basis. We will always be into linux and free software, if only to give us a bargaining chip with Microsoft!
We understand the reasons Bruce has previously communicated for leaving HP. Though we wish he was staying because he's so damn cool, we understand that he may be better able to follow his dreams elsewhere. Bruce isn't pissed at HP.
HP has a business relationship with MS, but we aren't afraid of them. Business relationships are about making money. If our relationship with MS remains profitable, we will continue it. If our relationship with free software, open source, and linux remains profitable, we will continue it. That's how business works. We're here to maximize shareholder value. If free software remains economically sound (and it will), the community has nothing to worry about.
WD Out.
insert disk.
click "install".
click on disk druid to install on secondary drive.
click click click.
wait.
dd if=/mnt/hda/etc of=/etc
dd if=/mnt/hda/home of=/home
dd if=/mnt/hda/usr/local of=/usr/local
reboot.
ayieeee!!!!!!!! kernel panic.
reboot to working backup.
fix and repeat.
There's alot to be said for real partitions. Nothing good backups can't replace, but invaluable when you don't have them.
Okay, let's find the flaws
Perens is an idealist and a radical. Radicals have their history twisted to make them look like *evil* bastards by their opponents, and idealism is an impediment in politics. You want to *look* like you're an idealist, not be one.
There actually is at least one representative that has a pretty strong alignment with the pro-free-use, anti-government-regulated-Internet types that frequent Slashdot -- Rep. Boucher, from VA. He's figured prominently as the "good guy" in a number of Slashdot stories, and makes me feel good about the legislative branch, despite a few despicable legislators like the Senator from Disneyland.
Also, geeks will get a lot more support at the minute, as the telecom and tech companies are buying off legislators left and right.
May we never see th
good luck bruce...
f HP...
heh...
I'm not so sure that IBM doesn't have a bit of a "bad rap" for being overly corporate in the past.
However, IBM just laid off thousands of workers, and there are hiring freezes all over. This is probably not a good time to try getting into IBM. I have a friend that spent the least three summers at IBM, and he says that you now need a signed okay from the site manager to hire *anyone*.
OTOH, I'm not sure what IBM's position is with MS -- whether they're as antagonistic with MS as Sun or not.
Both IBM and Sun want to ease into open source w/o risking too much. Right now, with open source just barely starting to be adopted in the business/government world, hiring someone as visible as Perens might be risky.
May we never see th
There was also the case of the time when Microsoft bought Hotmail, and decreed that hotmail shall be moved to NT. Quite the debacle that. I remember the absolute glee of the Sun Microsystem reps when they were able to cackle about Microsoft purchasing $6Million of Sun products to keep Hotmail alive.
If Microsoft can't make NT work, to the tune of $6M, then don't expect anybody else to.Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Could you please cite a single story, article, or comment where Bruce bashed HP? I have seen him defend HP dozens of times. I have never seen him bash his employer.
I modified my own DMCA paper to protect HP's Linux program.
There were no blacklist threats. I became convinced that I'd hurt HP's Linux program if I went ahead. My boss was very considerate, he even flew out to give a preamble to my talk explaining HP's position.
Give me some time to investigate the situation, as this is the first I've heard of it - right here on Slashdot as I come home from dinner. HP is really still two companies in many ways - Compaq and HP will take a long time to become entirely integrated, and obviously tru64 is on the Compaq side. If this is real, I'll have some criticism for HP management.
The worst I see him doing, is claiming that he would criticize HP management. I don't see him actually doing it. Even though he no longer works for HP, he is still defending them:
Well, I guess "being fired" gets news - but I would rather the article was just about me and not about HP. Besides, everybody knew I was leaving due to the two articles here previously, and it really was an amicable parting.
Wow, you're stupid.
He obviously didn't base his entire order on whether it ran Linux. If you're trying to focus on maintaining *one* set of software and avoid vendor lock-in, however, you can legitimately decide ahead of time the OS you want to use. Lots of places run out and look for a Windows server, or a Solaris server. They have a big installed base, and IT people that know their platform. So he had already decided on Linux. Big reaking deal.
You think he was buying a $500,000 rig to play Microsoft Flight Simulator, maybe?
May we never see th
My expeience can be summed up as so. When I cross the bridge in the Bay Area, I pay 3.50, now it's going to be 5 bucks.
Does anyone on the other side of the bridge have any 42 pin memory for my Compaq 386 portable? (where's everex these days)
Does anyone On the other side of the bridge have any ink refills for my DeskJet 500C, or better yet can I get a crack for the embedded "expired" chipp0r on my 2000c ?
What about that modem in my Compaq Presario, is there ANYTHING that will fit in that slot available on the other side of the bridge?
Can anyone validate my parking ticket on the other side of the bridge?
Do I get a free cup of StarBucks with every 5 bucks I pay to cross the Bay?
Umm, isn't it the other way around? When I'm using Linux, I'm never thinking about Microsoft, but when I'm using Microsoft products, I'm always thinking "gosh, I wish I were using Linux instead!"
Oh, give it a rest. They're easier to administer *for BSD people*, same as Linux is easier to administer *for Linux people*. Functionally, compared to the alternatives, they're freaking identical. You get an x86 platform, you plop a UNIX-like OS on it.
As it happens, Linux gets more press. I frankly would prefer Linux over BSD, but not the the point of dying over it.
Just because BSD is suitable for the job doesn't mean that Linux isn't.
May we never see th
The VM upheaval in early 2.4 (so-called "stable" series).
Uh, huh. And no one is going to get a random kernel and plop it on a $500K machine. They're going to get a vendor-tested and supported solution, like Red Hat or something, which actually undergoes serious "enterprise-level" QA. And doesn't have these problems.
Also, you're a troll.
May we never see th
This just in! Software socialism (GPL) doesn't sell.
(Duh)
Yes, you've got me, it technically isn't theft if you give it up willingly. However, I want the world to move forward and think such senseless charity plays into the hands of those who would destroy rather than create. It's like giving money to people on the street who would rob you of it if they were strong enough and/or no cops were watching.
Of course, perhaps I'm seeing it from the wrong perspective. Let me try again...
The flexibility to use and add to what you create while simultaneously witholding anything of value that I may add myself is such a wonderful flexibility really. I think that it's what everybody should do (except for me of course) exclusively.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
You have obviously never worked at IBM; only those who are annointed by the marketing fairy dare speak in public as IBM employees. All others speak only a private citizens. When one of the annointed speaks out against something, you can bet that that speech is a carefully articulated company line.
Likely, it is the same at Hewlett-Compaqard, and the issue was one of the indivisibility of his speech as a private citizen from his status as an HP employee. One of them had to go.
-- Terry
This brings up something I've always wondered...
Why is it that a quote from anyone dead is automatically accepted?
People willquote Stalin if he said something that they like, but will acknowledge that they don't like everything he had to say. Yet, people throw quotes around as if it is a fact, just because someone recognizable happened to utter it.
Maybe I should post some quotes by Thomas Jefferson that discouraged creation of a federal bank, and other things that we might disagree with today, and see what people say.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Hey, look, if you're gonna chew the gum and key the cars, and open the DVD, you should expect to be caned, Bruce.
Geez.
Huh? Whazzat? Oh. Canned...
Nevermind. Beats being canned by Libby's!
She's up in 2006. We really need a primary opponent as she was co-sponsor of CBDTPA (S.2048) and USA PATRIOT. I'll give you the maximum allowed to defeat her.
sulli
RTFJ.
AFAIK, Perens resigned, but HP are calling it a 'termination'. According to the article, it was 'amicable'. I think this is a Good Thing. Perens and HP were going in completely opposite directions, and his brand of 'advocacy' was probably doing them more harm than good. Also, I happen to be one of those people who believe in quiet advocacy - Linux is creeping onto the agendas of HP, IBM, DELL and others - all the important industry players and playmakers. There's bound to be a trickle down effect, all the way to the home user eventually - which is exactly what has happened with Microsoft products during the last 15 years. When all the shouting has finished, and the people doing it go away, we'll see what we're really left with and I suspect it'll be just as much, going on for more, than when the shouting was in effect. Finally, isn't Perens a "Free Software" advocate, as opposed to "OpenSource" as the article claims?
2) Piss off Dell "we refuse to sell Dell our printers"
3) Piss off the Open Source community and guarantee that nobody will use an HP box for a Linux server.
4> ???
5) Profit!
This will go down in history as just another small footnote on the road to HP's filing for bankruptcy. Sort of sad, but the old HP we all used to love is dead already.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
I guess its a matter of whether you want to interpret it as
"The freedom to take stuff"
or
"The freedom to have stuff taken from you"
Its a matter of whether a given developer has ideological problems with someone using their freely distributed solution to create a new solution that is not free (and thus locking away any potential improvements that tree of development and use might ever produce from every other development and use tree) and thus working to ensure that any future development/use patterns of the solution will also be free to be adopted, improved, etc (the GPL) OR if they're just glad that what they believe is a good solution gets used as widely as possible.
I see merits in both attitudes, and potential for abuse in both. As a person of a rather puritanical bent though, I tend to get itchy about people reaping rewards they didn't earn or contribute to (I don't have much fun in Vegas obviously) and thus tend to favor the GPL outlook.
Frankly though, I just want to beat the ideologues of both camps with clawhammers. In a purely metaphorical sense, of course.
Tim Gaastra
Build a better mousetrap and the world will immediately get their fingers caught in it.
Thank you for explaining the differences. (RM101)
RM101 rules! Join the RM101 fan club today!
Make world.
I agree with the notion best tool for the job. However upgrades are very easy with *BSD. Make world, modify configs, reboot. None of that package stuff.
Why would Bruce Perens be the person to talk to companies about adopting Linux? Is he a CIO? An experienced sys admin? A network admin? A security specialist? Does he have an in depth familiarity of proprietary Operating Systems that's required to accurately compare them to Open Source competitors?
/. has a lot of growing up to do.
Exactly who is Perens? A former maintainer for one of the smaller Linux distributions, ex Pixar employee and founder of the OSI? That's great, but I simply doubt Perens has the experience necessary to be a good advocate - good advocates have a well rounded view of the world and experience in both what they're advocating for and against. I don't think Bruce Perens would make a good advocate, because he has bugger-all idea of what he's advocating against, and very little experience in the kinds of environments where Linux is most successful - the kind of conservative businesses looking at Linux as replacements to their reliable Unix systems, and the Windows `shops' that are looking to add Linux systems to their networks as web, file and print, and firewall/PAT servers.
Somehow I doubt Perens was ever qualified in his job as an evangelist to HPs target market. As such, I don't think its a bad thing they let him go.
Go on, mark me as a troll, and scream at me for being a Windows apologist. As I type this on my RH Null system and prepare to go to work for a company as a primarily Linux based systems administrator, I'll know its bullshit. I'll also know
I was, frankly, amazed when HP hired Bruce, in that they were employing someone who was actively hostile to their best interests. When I inquired as to why they were doing this, I was told that they felt that, by employing him, they would gain valuable goodwill from users of Linux and thus be able to catch the Linux "buzz." They also thought that, via careful scrutiny, they could prevent Bruce from giving away or otherwise compromising IP they really valued.
The balance shifted when HP merged with Compaq, however. Suddenly, a much larger portion of the company's business hinged on Microsoft's goodwill rather than that of Linux users. So, it should be no surprise that Bruce's tenure at HP is history.
Given not only its new circumstances but the fate of companies that have attempted to embrace the GPL (few are left alive today), HP has likely realized that it must now take a more sensible approach to open source. It should embrace BSD -- which actually freer and more open than GPLed software, is not business-hostile, and for which Microsoft has voiced support. If HP chooses a more moderate open source advocate from the BSD camp, it will be in much better shape. It won't have to worry that its open source "guru" will hurt its interests by trying to give away the farm, advocating unwise business strategies, or antagonizing Microsoft (which, at least for now, could prove fatal). And it won't wind up in a situation where it loses control of its IP, or finds itself unable to maintain an edge, due to the business-hostile provisions of the GPL. In short, this could be a winning move for HP.
The truth, however, is that corporations are governments.
Corporations use people as interchangeable parts, ingesting them and spitting them out at will. They set rules of behavior, reward and penalize individuals, and are larger, richer, and more powerful than any individual can ever be. What's more, if they grow powerful enough (e.g. if the monopolize the market for a good or service), individuals must agree to whatever terms they set.
Do these characteristics sound more like those of an indivdual or those of a government?
It's also worth noting that, back in the days before democracy, we had a different kind of government: empires. An overwhelming force would conquer your region, and you would have no choice but to pay tribute to your new master.
Corporate empires -- such as telecommunications giants -- are very much the same. When Verizon conquered the eastern seaboard via corporate mergers, did customers have a say? Not a chance.
If Libertarians recognized (as they should!) that corporations were in fact governments, they would realize that corporations' powers must be limited. More so, in fact, than those of elected governments, where the people at least have some control of what the behemoth does.
--Brett Glass
If any of these companies hires Perens, the same thing will happen. Perens will happily advocate Linux and Free software from an ethical point of view, and will get into trouble as soon as his vision diverges from that of the corporate masters. This will inevitably happen, because of "alpha", above.
Sun and IBM know that if you hire someone on the basis of him having strong, loud opinions, they shouldn't imagine he'll change them for their convenience. It would be a huge mismatch for both parties.
That said, good luck to Mr. Perens in whatever he puts his hand to next. But don't forget "alpha"!
What issues do you have with using a package system? Keep in mind that ports *is* a package system -- as a matter of fact, the top hit on google for "package system" is a NetBSD page.
May we never see th
This goes to show you how far Microsoft is from being a true free market player. In any capitalistic market, a company's largest customer should hold incredible power, not the other way around.
Look at Wal-Mart. They have the power to tell their suppliers how, when, where, and and under what terms they will buy products. That's because Wal-Mart buys more than anyone else.
HP should wake up and realize that it holds the power in the relationship. If MS doesn't like it, then HP can install Corel Office on their PC's. Microsoft will have lost a big chunk of revenue from their largest customer, not to a mention significant user base.
Actually Perens is a drop-out who didn't study computers in college, and he's a very good programmer, having built most of Pixar's tools Bruce is a self taught genius and this is surely HP's loss, not his.
Check my site out for ogg vorbis music produced with linux.
Who decides "what else" the company's purpose is. Is it to save Africa? Preserve rainforest? Promote Free Software? Destroy Free Software? Who gets to pick? You? The government we all love and trust so much? A vote of the stock-holders -- whoops, per argument above, that's the only way we can't decide.
Don't forget that there is an outlet for people who want to start a corporation dedicated to things other than profit. They're called non-profits.
I'm curious as to why he backed out of the DMCA challenge--usually employees can see their own demise from miles away. Was he just holding onto the small string of hope that by backing off from breaking the DMCA he'd impress his superiors enough to keep him on the job?
:-) (Which is cool on its own, but anyway..)
I find it hard to swallow that Bruce is touting the "ethics" of his position and how uncompromising he is when he chickened out of something he was garnering a great deal of press for to begin with.
As for the article--I don't consider Bruce our leader. There are no leaders. That's partly what's so great about all this. Heck, I don't even know of anyone who follows him. He's just mouthy as all heck..!
Oh you poor sweet gullible thing...
"They can still support Linux and open source without Bruce around, and not have to worry about the potential for problems with MS."
Ho ho ho. AS LONG AS HP SUPPORTS LINUX IN ANY WAY SHAPE OR FORM THERE IS "POTENTIAL FOR PROBLEMS WITH MS". Microsoft is a company that has bribed and heavied *foreign national governments* to squash Linux. In comparison a US-based company is easy meat.
Nope, getting Bruce out of the way is the first stage in quietly de-emphasising Linux and dropping the corporation's collective trousers for Billy, Steve and friends.
Lessee...
Compaq is a major Micro$hit OEM, and in competition with Dell. Merger happens. Microsoft heavies make discrete approaches saying that if they get don't get rid of Perens Microsoft could just possibly jack up the OEM Windows licence price, making Compaq less competitive.
Management of the merged company turfs Perens out the airlock and gets a real nice price on Windoze...
Interesting how you compare a license that preserves the rights of the author and the freedom of the software in question to syphilis. Last time I checked, anyone who contracted syphilis did so because of engaging in sexual contact without knowing the other person was infected.
The GPL lays your rights as a user of the software right down, expressly enumerating what you are allowed to do and what you aren't. The GPL was designed for a different purpose than the BSD license; the GPL ensures that the software and its derivatives will always remain in the public domain, where the BSD license focuses on placing as few restrictions on its use as possible.
Please elaborate on your previous post.
What, you mean like when Windows NT took out the U.S.S. Yorktown?
Or perhaps the endless backdoors that no one can actually audit because the EULA doesn't allow for it? So even the most paranoid of the paranoid get owned as a result?
Or perhaps you should instead rephrase your question into "Why Linux?" and then go read what Peruvian Congressman Dr. Edgar David Villaneuca Nunez has to say about the matter?
Dare I mention Microsoft's well-known anti-competitive ways?
Sometimes--even if a commercial tool is "better" for the task (and I really don't think it is), blind application of pure personal utilitarianism means you have to set aside any morals about supporting a corporation that's as blatantly ruthless as Microsoft is.
But hey--if you don't mind contributing to Microsoft's current inhumanity, then by all means, go ahead and pay their outrageous licensing fees and the more power to ya.
No, really: you just go ahead and knock down your straw man--in this case perhaps named the "One True Operating System" zealot--and the rest of us sane individuals will keep on doing real work with tools we know we can trust.
which is exactly why we're switching to *BSD here.
The mortuary?
Isnt it possible that this guy was canned because he was constantly dissing and bashing a huge HP/Compaq partner which is general not a business-like thing to do whether its Microsoft or anyone else, its just unprofessional. And when the company that signs your checks every 2 weeks tells you to stop and you think you're above the law because you're "Bruce Perens" then I'd can you too. Take the whole Microsoft part out of this equation, this guy was unprofessional and an embarrassment to the company and he deserved a pink slip after not heeding several warnings. Not everything is a Microsoft conspiracy.
As an open source advocate? Not likely!
Being on ham radio all day, on the other hand...
The apocalypse is coming, folks. You saw it here first...
I mean really. Are these kinds of histrionics necessary?
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I really think we shouldn't be buying HP crap anyway.
Look. It went downhill with the fucking female CEO that they have now. Carly. Wow. She's done great for shareholder value. She's systematically destroying one of the greatest computer companies ever.
So we can show solidarity with Bruce and put another nail in her coffin by not buying anything from HP.
No more HP printers. Go for the epson or canon. Maybe the Lexmark since IBM supports linux.
No more HP scanners.
No more HP computers. Fuck it, build your own. Everyone on this site should be building computers themselves. Or you're a lazy asshole.
No more HP big hardware. Screw the A's, L's, N's, and domes. Fuckit. Get suns or IBMs.
Fuck openview. Go for Tivoli. Well, maybe find something that works.
Don't buy HP calculators. She fired the fucking developers. Damn. Buy a TI. TI fucking rules the calculator world.
Don't by an HP camera. Get one from a real camera company.
I used to have a XP 256 and it was great compared to the overpriced shit that EMC sells. EMC is ok as long as you're willing to pay for professional services for every fucking config change. Well find some storage.
"Yes, Linux is malleable to the point of silliness, but why make a new hammer out of clay when Microsoft and IBM already have steel hammers that are have a much longer, and more proven, track record?"
(emphasis mine).
What are you smoking?
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
"Unless Bruce and whoever was responsible for firing him both speak out, we'll never know all the reasons for letting him go"
You know what the great thing about a situation like that is? It is perfectly acceptable, as an observer in the free world, to fill in the information gaps and form an opinion.
I've made up my mind for now... It doesn't look good for Compaq.
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
One of the problems of running for office is that you have to represent all of the people, not just a single issue (OK, a bunch of technology and civil liberty issues).
That's really one of the fundamental problems with the US democratic model. It's locked in this "pocket borough" early-19th Century model, with no transferable votes and single-seat elections. Most modern democracies that came about in the late 19th Century wisely moved to some version of proportional representation, which enables single-issue candidates and niche parties. Instead of deadening consensus bilateral politics you get a coalition and a delicate interplay of negotiation. You also get to laugh at some absurd combinations of parties (such as in Italy or Israel) and laughing at pols is always A Good Thing.
Da Blog
With Linux distros upgrades are packaged, very time consuming, and error prone. CVS does it for me orders of magnitude faster. Try it someday.
The dead (obviously) can't make arguments.(*)
When writers attribute quotes, take it as
Someone else had this idea and
(1) it applies to this situation, or..
(2) I am not trying to take credit for clever wording [*BSD license!]
(3) variation of "been there done that, we're repeating the past"
If he is (or was) a high profile executive in the company, that makes sense.
I can only assume, so maybe someone could spell it out. Maybe even Bruce because it seems he, like myself, is going to have more time on his hands these days.
Of course the infallible way to know if it's the same guy is to check his user ID. The real Bruce Perens has User ID 3872.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
... the angry monkey dance, on the other hand, is the acme of professionalism, reasoned argument, taste and decorum.
Send her an email like everyone did during the DMCP furor. Just go to the page below, and fill out the form:
/ in dex.htm
http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/execteam/email/fiorina
(Careful, there is no space in the index.htm - Slashdot's editor is screwing up!)
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Not only that, DC weather looks NICE from where I sit...
---dragoness
but if we leave DC to only those who can take the weather, then we really will be leaving it to the swamp dwellers.
(Pictures New Orleans city politics applied to the whole nation.)
(Shudders and wakes abruptly from that evil nightmare...)
OTOH, I hear Hawaii's weather compares favorably to northern California.
---dragoness
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In the State of Texas, as part of the Articles of Incorporation, every corporation swears under oath that in exchange for the privileges they're receiving, they will benefit society.
"Making a profit," "maximizing shareholder value" isn't even mentioned. What is mentioned is this: If the Great State of Texas gives us the privileges of incorporation, we will benefit the People of Texas.
I'm sure the other states have similar language. Too bad everyone seems to have forgotten their initial oaths, isn't it?
Are those the only forms of clustering? What about high-availability clustering? Linux is way ahead of *BSD in that area.
"Garbage...spewing...idiot". You're a pretty abusive guy, you know that? You're providing a lot of heat but little light, and I suggest that you forego the abusive posturing until you can back it up with something.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
Liar. According to http://www.mosix.org/faq/output/faq_q0004.html MOSIX was originally built for Version 6 UNIX.
I may have flamed that AC, but stating *BSD doesn't support any clustering at all is absurd. High availability clustering is available for *BSD through "Eddie" and other such software.
http://eddie.sourceforge.net/what.html
Maybe, but it also ran on FreeBSD.
And it also runs on Linux. Thanks for the non sequitur.
Do you even know what high-availability clustering is? Eddie is quite obviously a load-balancing cluster, which is something completely different (and more limited). Check out http://www.redhat.com/services/focus/ha/ or http://linux-ha.org/ or http://www.turbolinux.com/products/tcs/ or http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=3247 for comparison. High availability clusters need more robust heartbeating, address takeover, volume recovery/takeover, and other features that load-balancers don't have. There might well be a true HA clustering solution for *BSD is still way behind Linux in that regard (as Linux is behind commercial UNIXen and even NT, BTW).
That's besides the point. The original poster claimed =there is no clustering AVAILABLE FOR *BSD.=
I never said it doesn't. Tahnks for wasting bandwidth.
Also Eddie, is an HA solution, not load balancing only. HA doesn't need to be a kernel feature. Eddie may even be better than what Linux kernel offers, or it may not. HA software does not need to be in-kernel.
Nobody said anything about HA needing to be in-kernel, dolt. Keep your red herrings to yourself. Eddie lacks the *other* HA features I mentioned, and that alone is sufficient to place it in a different category.
To borrow your own phrase, you are a "garbage...spewing...idiot". Learn something - anything! - before you open your mouth again.
But again, the original poster claimed *BSD cannot do _ANY_ clustering.
What is the algorithm to upgrade a Linux distro to a new version?
emerge rsync
emerge --update world
Gentoo linux rocks!!
You don't even have to create the throwaway email address you give them to register. Just make part of it a long string of random characters to make it unique.
And if they target advertisements to me, as a highly paid clergy working in agriculture in Antarctica, I haven't noticed.