Slashdot Mirror
Could Open Source Investment Save HP?
deadeyefred writes "HP's new CEO, Meg Whitman, has a number of issues to deal with to right the ship and put the company on a growth track again. Instead of massive changes to its organization and product line, could $4.5 billion in open source investments do the trick? An argument might be made that HP could boost its competitiveness by putting half of its R&D budget ($1.5 billion a year) into projects like Xen.org, Android and OpenStack. It would still be less than half what HP is paying for Autonomy and allow it to focus on solving problems rather than protecting proprietary product lines and fiefdoms."
I'm afraid you'll have to wait the obligatory week for your chance. The HP board is trying as hard as it can to match the CEO replacement cycle with the Mozilla release cycle, so give them a chance.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Sun's problem wasn't because they contributed to Open Source. The problem with Sun was that they couldn't be bothered with making money.
Oracle made their operations profitable within a year without any significant changes to their open source projects. Or in other words, had they chosen to support all the same open source efforts, the changes in marketing and management Oracle introduced still made sun profitable.
IBM contributes heavily to open source, and in fact might be the biggest contributor to open source, and they are quite profitable.
Google contributes heavily to open source, and they are quite profitable.
Companies that contribute to Open Source just cannot make that their *entire* business plan.