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January 18, 2006
HP wants part of the action - maybe
Maybe it's too early in the morning for me, but I've just read this article (via Dave) and I'm scratching my head wondering just exactly what HP is planning to do. The first paragraph of the article seems interesting:
Hewlett-Packard is considering selling services designed to ease customer participation in the open-source programming community, the company's new open-source boss said.
Although I sort of wonder just what exactly those "services" could be, I guess it will be explained in the next part of the article. But things get more confusing:
"Across HP, there are thousands of people who contribute to open source. We have a number of processes and tools we've developed to allow different folks in HP to interact with the open-source community that protects our intellectual property and is done in a community-friendly way," said Christine Martino, who became vice president of HP's Open Source and Linux Organization in November. "We needed to get some pretty crack procedures together. The team doing that has developed some interesting tools."
Well, our customers have been interacting with the Open Source community for nearly as long as we've been in the Open Source business (5 years). The tools they use - subversion, mailing-lists, wiki and community-gettogethers. No rocket science there.
Some education at the beginning to get them to see the value of getting involved - but apart from that. Sure, licensing issues and IP legalities have to be thought through - but normally every company is already purchasing and using software from somewhere and has already got the necessary legal stuff in place. Giving back to the community is new to most organizations - but my experience hasn't really shown that special tools and/or services are needed. Sometime we act as a proxy between corporations and the Open Source communities, but most often, they are visible themselves and active participants.
The rest of the article then basically loses me as it focusses on how Christine Martino wants to do more in the Linux and JBoss space - which sounds more like HP than the beginning of the - what seemed - promising article.
Hopefully there will be some discussions about this sort of thing at OSBC, as I'm certainly interested in hearing other angles.
Technorati Tags: opensource
Posted by Matthew at January 18, 2006 07:49 AM