Too much open source makes you sick

MAKER OF printer ink, HP has told IBM and Sun to abandon their open source licences and back the GNU general public licence.

The call came from Martin Fink, the vice president and general manager of HP NonStop Enterprise Division, Open Source at the Linux World Conference & Expo in San Francisco.

Fink said that the existence of too many types of open source licenses was causing interoperability problems. He was concerned about the proliferation of a number of licences that can call themselves open source.

He said that if Big Blue dumped its IBM Public License in favor of the GPL he would give an HP laptop loaded with Linux to IBM executives, including IBM Vice President Irving Wladawsky-Berger.

That could set him back a bit, so Fink obviously does not think it will happen. He offered to give a lap top loaded with Windows to Sun Microsystems Chairman and CEO Scott McNealy and President and COO Jonathan Schwartz if they kill off the CDDL licence and re-license Solaris 10 under the GPL.

According to Infoworld, the offer of corporate bribery got a laugh and a round of applause from the throng. A spokesSun dismissed Fink's comments as “sniping from the outlands of participation in the open source community”. While Sun have gone for 'the handbags at dawn' approach, IBM have ignored Fink entirely.

More here. µ