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."

And then...

[LuciferBlack]

"IBM and SUN then asked HP to price printer supplies at a reasonable cost which drew and even bigger round of applause..."

oh noes

[cptbarkey]

please sir, make your product less effective then mine. please?

Re:And then...

[X0563511]

I do! ...

Shit!

Re:A far more interesting story

[lucabrasi999]

I just don't know what slashdot is coming to these days... It ain't what it used to be.

Wow, these kind of sentiments, and your User ID is 707389? What time frame do you believe constitutes the "Good Old Days" of Slashdot, last week?

:)

Re:This just pisses me off!

[Anonymous Coward]

I've seen the source code to HPUX, and believe me, you wouldn't want to use it.

A cold day in hell...

[azemute]

Next thing you know, Apple will be insiting Windows Vista be licensed under the GPL.

Re:The GPL is great for a commodity OS.

[Lars T.]

Under the BSD license, we could see a "splintering" of the OS exactly as we did with the old *nixes. Under the GPL, that is impossible.

Yeah, under the GPL we only see something called GNU/forking, which is just great.