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HP Releases E-Speak under GPL
Govardhanen Gopal wrote to us with the word from HP that they have released e-speak under the GPL. E-Speak is apparently "...designed to find services and negotiate deals over the Internet." HP is going to try to setup an advisory council and will be using the language internally.
Thanks HP for choosing an existing licence instead of making up yet another open source licence. I hope you saved some money on lawyers by going that route.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
All in all, this seems pretty interesting, though HP's What is e-speak page is nothing but meaningless marketing buzz. I'm still very fuzzy on what this thing actually does though from what I understand it's a standard interface to e-commerce vendors and buyers. That sounds nifty, but whatever happened to mail-order? That still works for me....
What interested me about this press release was not so much that they have decided to go Open Source. This is great news, but lots of companies have done this recently.
Rather, I found it interesting that the reason seems to be that HP has realised that this is the only way to to deal in this business. Only by Open Source can they get their producta accepted widely.
Way to go, HP! When will you release the rest of your software?
Hi!
Just when it seams ever big company was going to spend a lot of money coming up with a new ass backwards license that will cause every OSS developer to look elsware up pops HP to say.
"We are too lazy to write a new license and too cheep to pay our lawyers to trash it out with the powers that be".
It's like this really cool game of leapfrog where everyone is trying to see how much they can get the Linux community to be on his side. HP is edging towards the lead with this.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
Use the Source, Luke. (Now that it is available.)
Slightly more serious: When did a product with "e-" in the name ever actually have to do anything useful or new for the stock price to go up? That seems to be the main point of these e-press e-releases. God knows HP needs all the good PR they can get these days.
More serious: I think you got the basic idea: interface to e-commerce sites. "What happened to mail-order?" -- where have you been the last few years!? :-)
An approach based on standard components is (almost) always a good idea, in e-business or elsewhere, as long as the components have widespread acceptance. The GPL of the source should help with this. In e-business, with many new and changing channels (WAP, voice services, your freezer...) we really need an approach that takes us away from HTML based solutions an into a content-rich environment. XML goes some way for the data, e-speak might go some way for the systems and processes.
Has anybody implemented this, and if so, do they knw what the impact on the biusiness processes are, if any? It seems to me like e-speak locks you down a bit - of course you can always change it but that kind of defeats the purpose.
Hi!
As long as they keep innovating and produce useful products. How long did Adobe sell Photoshop before the Open Source GIMP solution came along?
GPL is not inconsistent with profits, as RMS has pointed out several times. It seems to me that HP is moving in the right direction: release the basic set of components so that everybody can agree at the low level and everybody is free to innovate and implement new solutions on top of the platform. Then bet their business that they are the better innovators, that they understand the customers better than anybody else.
It might be scary for some managers, but I think that is the way of the future. Organisations will differentiate themselves on how well they understand their cusomers, and on how well they ca build customer loyalty.
Welcome to the New World (tm).
Hi!
Seriously, though, this is excellent news. Hopefully, HP will experience total success with this project, demonstrating once and for all that the GPL -is- a perfectly viable licence for a commercial company to use.
I wish HP well with this experiment, and will be taking a look to see if/how I could make use of this program - if only to vote with my feet (& disk space) my support for this move.
It'll also be great to be able to poke around at the source code, for a change. How long before a MySQL patch is posted, somewhere? (Oracle is cool, but a serious memory hog!)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
For business-to-business commerce, it's another matter entirely. I can see Compaq, for example, requiring all its suppliers to use an e-speak-compatible protocol; then, every time Compaq wants to order another thousand motherboards for its factory, its computers can call its supplier's computers and order from whichever supplier quotes the best terms.
Likewise, if a motherboard manufacturer can use the same e-speak-compatible protocol with Compaq, HP, Gateway, etc., it can have a server that examines the orders sent from various OEMs and decides how much to quote each one. (The manufacturer's director of sales could say, "Those guys at Compaq are such a pain to deal with, I don't want their business unless they offer 10% more than their competitors"; translating that demand into logic on the server would be a Simple Matter of Programming.)
Furthermore, while Compaq might want to negotiate with its suppliers in this way, they probably don't want to pay licensing fees to HP (their competitor in the Intel-compatible PC market) for the privilege.
So HP did well for society by making the protocol open-source; we'll see if they can do well for themselves by selling e-speak-related products to other companies. (For an explanation of why the GPL is better for this situation than the BSD, see my comment on the selfish case for the GPL.)
send all spam to theotherwhitemeat@ropine.com
If e-speak can grow the internet business market... that means more servers and clients as well, right? And more support...
And HP also happens to sell desktops, workstations, servers, and massive servers all along the chain of devices.
That's one opportunity if e-speak takes off; HP can not only sell you the solution, they can sell you the hardware to run the solution the most effectively!
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
Don't know about e-speak itself, but it's a bear trying to get it up on an HPUX system.
It's so much nicer on a Linux system (hint-hint. Any HPUX people reading?)
Installing GNU tools, Perl, Python, LDAP, SSL, Apache, etc. Of course these prolly aren't necessary for deployment, but they are for development.
What have you tried to do with e-speak? I thought it was still too beta to do much-maybe I'm wrong?
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
mainly griping because I'm installing and dealing with espeak on an HPUX system right now...
Mayhaps I should be posting Anonymously or something...
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
This looks like more good vibes from HP.
Remember when they asked O'Reilly to handle SourceExchange for them? Their reasoning was that they didn't want their competitors to feel wary of participating and benefitting from it.
Their intentions appear to be quite noble. It's as if they're pulling for the industry as a whole.
Methinks it's time for Slashdot to do an interview with the person(s) at HP responsible for these great actions. I really want to know how they got around the bullshit you'll get at a more typical company when suggesting these things.