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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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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.
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'?
Lets hope he joins Dell.
Dude, You're Getting a Job!
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?
Yes, I'm sure Bill Gates personally has a black list in his office with the names of all Open Source advocates that have challenged his empire and every morning, at a strategic meeting with his closest advisors, he has a conversation like this:
- Bill, we have successfully increased the revenue of the company by 20%. We expect this to bring the stockholders to the level of optimism they had before the recession.
Bill: Yeah, yeah, whatever...
- Bill, our deals with the media conglomerates regarding DRM are proceeding flawlessly, ensuring that we are unopposed to push for the PC as the consumer device that coordinates everyone's information-related activities, including entertainment.
Bill: Sure. That's nice, I guess.
- Bill, our marketing campaign for Web Services is being successful among developers. Soon they will be tied to our standards and companies will have to consider Windows servers seriously for their large-scale network services.
Bill: What's wrong with you people? Is this what I pay you for?!
Silence.
Bill: Ok, who can answer the really important question? How close am I to fulfilling my personal vendetta against the Open Source Linux geeks? How many did we get fired today?
- I called HP yesterday morning. We got Bruce Perens fired.
Bill: Geek #427? EXCELLENT!
Bill takes list, draws little check mark on "#427 Bruce Perens" entry.
Bill: Ok. According to my list, "#428 Billy Tempherton" is next. He's a Linux administrator for a community college in Iowa that posted something about me being evil and Windows crashing his computer, at that Slashdot site in 1999...
- We're working on it, Sir!
Bill: Good! Meeting dismissed! I have to go to Slashdot and see who posted something against me today...
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
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.
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?
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.
"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
What happens if you get into a dispute with the oxygen vendor and threaten to cut off your purchases? If worse comes to worst and you do stop buying from him, he might go bankrupt. On the other hand he might not - there are a lot of people who need to breathe. You on the other hand will certainly die.
That's the problem the OEMs face when dealing with Microsoft.
sPh
It's more a measure of the influence that the incoming Compaq people are having on HP. Compaq, overall, was staunchly a pro-Microsoft computer maker, far more than HP ever was. Compaq's lifeblood was machines running Windows 2000. HP had other irons in the fire, and could deal with a more tepid relationship.
When I was working there as a consultant, pro-Microsoft propaganda was everywhere. Sure, there were plenty of Linux people working there, but it was really under the radar. Microsoft was the party line and woe to anyone who would challenge that too vocally. Yeah, Compaq didn't mind if Linux ran on their machines, but they didn't really put a whole lot of effort into it. IIRC, Microsoft bought an obscene number of Compaq machines during the time I was there. There was also a massive Windows 2000 migration push at the time, which may have been related to it.
I've posted regarding this before, but I think it bears restatement. There are an AWFUL lot of strong personalities in what used to be Compaq, hardened by a bitter internal war during the days after the Digital merger. Large caliber bullets didn't fly, but there was a whole lot of political fallout, even when I was there long after the merger (for about a year, from summer 2000 to summer 2001 before the consultancy I worked for laid me off). The "HP Way", as laid back as it's projected to be, I believe, cannot stand up to the hardened take-no-prisoners warriors at Compaq. Sure, alot of people at Compaq are going to get laid off, but sometimes you have to sacrifice your own men in a battle to win a war, and I would bet that's how the Compaq people see it, a war to save their way of doing things, and in the end, their personal employment.
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.