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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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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.
Hey Bruce, why not run for congress?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
I wonder why the link got broken - I think I even double-checked it. Anyway, maybe it works this time?
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.
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
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.
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."
On Bruce Perens Bio:
Among my assignments is to challenge HP management.
That's what he thought!
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
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?
"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
Yes, it's visible right there. Has always been. Yet in the comments, now we have the [link.com] notation to avoid goatse links sneaking unto readers.
Why? Because we're LAZY. And because when we're reading Slashdot, we're not in our most intellectually aware (or porn-browsing paranoid) mood.
Almost flawlessly the "Free Registration required: blah blah blah" warning has been there, so at least I got used to the idea that if something similar wasn't there, I could click away.
Once more, not a matter of life-or-death. Just something NICE to do, to save a percentage of your users two clicks and an annoyance.
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
"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....Just so we don't bother."
Yeah, who wants to bother with articles in one of the oldest and best newspapers in the United States, just because they ask for a user name and password and haven't ever sent one word of junk mail to registered users. A reputable journalistic organization like Slashdot would _never_ do something like that. F**k the bastards at the New York _Times_!
hyacinthus.
(P. S. If it weren't for the _Times_ supplying a good fraction of Slashdot's reportage, so-called, there wouldn't be terribly much interesting to read here.)
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.
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).
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
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?
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.
Would you like fries with that?
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
Did anyone else notice that sincerechoice.org displays correctly in Internet Explorer but not in Mozilla?
He's right. Shouldn't HP have leverage over Microsoft?
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
I highly doubt that many people aren't using linux because they're following the Hurd.
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.
i thought about that when i was writing it. i think you know the hurd i'm talking about.
-- john
Are we sure this was the "Real Bruce Perens" - check his employee number to be sure.
(play on his old sig)
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"
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
No, it's no different from the banner hanging on the wall of the bar whose right half advertises Naked Jell-O Shot Sports Bar Foam Party Nite, and whose left half is a Budweiser logo. They know the bar is more than happy to advertise for Bud in return for the distributor paying for the banner.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
I hope you get modded through the floor. Not because you slam Bruce, but because your brain is obviously not engaged.
I don't know Bruce, but I think he gets a lot of credit for standing up for his values. He sees the value in open source, and he was willing to take a fall for that. Who are you to criticize him???
And by the way, the business world does care about *real* solutions: which is exactly why he was so useful to Pixar in the production of several films.
Seriously, did you even think before posting?!
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
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 ?
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'?
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"
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.
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.
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
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
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
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
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.
Jerry, tpot and I aren't worried about this. I spoke to Bruce :-) :-).
at LinuxWorld before he left, I understand why he is leaving
and I'm sorry. I wish he wasn't, but it doesn't affect what
we do with Samba (mainly fix printing bugs at the moment it
seems
Jeremy Allison,
Samba Team.
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
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
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.
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..!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"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
#1 concerns me.
It's not me misunderstanding what someone is trying to say. I've seen, time and time again, author after author using a quote from someone notable as if it proves his point.
e.g. "Country XYZ is evil. FDR once called it '... an evil country...' "
Of course, that brings up the question, what made that person say it, and why use a quote rather than the evidence supporting (or undermining) that quote. It's all too often just glossed over that some person is not the authority on every subject they've ever talked about just because they were well know, and now dead. I may just be missing something, but I simply fail to see the logic there.
If it wasn't for temporary problems I'm having, I would inundate you with quotes from ex-presidents that sound silly/stupid now.
Everyone should remember that, anyone that lived more than about 200 years ago, believed the world was flat, and believed in sea serpents, and all sort of other manner of things that seem silly now. Yet, we defer to them as if their quotes are infallable.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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.
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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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.