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HP Calls For Sun and IBM to Remove OS Licenses

Posted by Zonk on from the cow-for-free dept.

Rob writes "Computer Business Review is reporting that in order to help nudge Linux and open source software further into the enterprise, a vice president at Hewlett-Packard Co yesterday called on rivals IBM Corp and Sun Microsystems Inc to invalidate their open-source software licenses in favor of a free licensing model. During his keynote at the LinuxWorld Conference in San Francisco yesterday, HP's vice president of open source and NonStop Enterprise Martin Fink commended the Open Source Initiative on setting up new rules to limit the growth of open-source licenses." From the article: "He asked IBM to deprecate its open-source license and instead put it under the General Public License, the most popular license for free software that gives users the freedom run the program for any purpose, to study how it works, to modify and improve it and distribute copies. In contrast, an open-source license, like IBM's, is copyrighted. Fink also called on Sun Microsystems to deprecate its Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL), which applies to OpenSolaris, GlassFish and JWSDP, and to re-license Solaris 10 under the General Public License, which drew the crowd's applause."

5 of 424 comments (clear)

  1. A lot of hot air by j1mmy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    HP is moving more and more towards the consumer desktop market. Is this guy even going to have a job next week?

    (first post?)

  2. Pot calling Kettle... by knarfling · · Score: 5, Interesting
    They have some nerve telling other companies to give out free licencing.

    My company that just purchased 3 computers from HP. There was a total of 5 dual core CPUs. We had to purchase 10 licences for HP-UX 11.11. Utilities that were an extra charge had to be purchased on a per CPU basis as well. A utility that cost $300 ended up costing $3000 even if it was only used on one machine. And they have the nerve to tell other companies to make their licences free???

    HP, if you want others to change their licences, lead by example.

    --
    Great civilizations have lived and died on false theories. Don't mess up mine with a few facts.
    1. Re:Pot calling Kettle... by ak3ldama · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Sun Solaris 10 is also based on SVR4. But you probably knew that.

      --
      "but money is the God of Algiers & Mahomet their prophet." - Rich. O'Bryen June 8th 1786
  3. Re:Fink confused on licenses by jiushao · · Score: 3, Interesting
    CDDL a mess? It is just the Mozilla Public License 1.1 with the word "Mozilla" replaced by "covered software". It is old, established and is both an approved OSI license and a Free Software license approved by the FSF. Sure, it is GPL-incompatible, but so is the IBM Public License.

    I have no idea how Sun ended up hated by Slashdot. They sell Linux, they open-sourced the Solaris kernel, they have cooperated with OSS operating systems to get them running on their hardware. Lets not forget a huge donation in the form of buying StarOffice and immediately open-sourcing it. The completely open and royalty-free SPARC architecture (as opposed to the far-from-open PPC). Few companies have done more.

    There have been some back and forth on how they perceive Linux, but considering that Linux has been eating Sun's marketshare quickly the last decade they sure seem to have a very good relationship with Linux and related technologies.

  4. Re:Don't Forget Apple's APSL! by TheRaven64 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The APSL has a huge advantage over the GPL - it is per-file. You can APSL a source file and this has no effect whatever on the license of your entire work (unless you use a restrictive license like the GPL).

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