HP Calls For Sun and IBM to Remove OS Licenses

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."

Comments

Re:Why

[Spodlink05]

Why? The article doesn't explain WHY it would be good for IBM and Sun to switch their licenses. To me, it seems like Fink is just trying to garner some positive attention to HP, which has been looked upon negatively for some time in the technical community.

It wouldn't be good for IBM or SUN, it would be good for HP, why else would he say it? All you need to do to please ./ types these days is shout open source and they all start gormlessly clapping like guppies. You don't need to give silly things like reasons and logical arguments. Tsk!