Stardate 20010823.1747 (On Screen): Bruce Perens, this is your wake-up call. Perens is a high-profile advocate of the Open Source movement and has been
pushing an attempt to try to shake down the large computer companies who have been selling Linux and other open source programs. He stridently claim that they should
"give something back", i.e. to grant royalty-free licenses to patents and to open and release source to proprietary products. He is a vice president at HP and, supposedly, HP's senior strategist in charge of Linux and Open Source. However, that title may mean much less than it appears to; companies the size of HP often have hundreds of vice presidents. (Titles are cheap.) The way to judge someone's importance from outside a company is to observe their ability to influence events. (If you're inside a company, the way to judge is to find out how big a budget they control.) We, outside here, now have the opportunity to judge Perens.
HP is now releasing its own branded Linux version, and it's going to be selling it for $3000 per license. It includes, apparently, substantial amounts of proprietary software to increase security of the system. It may well be worth what they're charging, actually. But it tends to discredit Perens that his own company, where he would be expected to have even more influence than anywhere else, is not complying with his views about "giving back". It appears to be a complete repudiation. If Perens' own employer won't play along, why should IBM and the other companies that Perens has targeted even give him the time of day, let alone their intellectual crown jewels? It is now apparent that Perens' real job function at HP is to be "token" in the most negative sense of that word. (discuss)
