Open Source Blog

HP to ramp up open source services
May 25, 2007

I just finally got round to reading an interesting piece about HP’s open source services business written by my colleague Rhonda Ascierto, and interesting reading it makes too.

While open source has expanded rapidly across the breadth of enterprise applications in recent years, services firms have been surprisingly slow to react, leaving gaps for the likes of SpikeSource and OpenLogic.

More recently the likes of Atos Origin and Unisys have woken up to the potential, and given HP’s involvement with Linux, it’s no surprise to see the company catching up.

It’s also good to see the company focusing on legal issues without resulting to scare tactics.

“The company began its push into open source services last year, but about four months ago appointed Randy Hergett as director of engineering of its open source and Linux unit to drive new initiatives,” writes Rhonda.

“Among his targets are open source legal compliance and licensing, which is one of the biggest challenges of open source governance that HP customers face, Hergett said in an interview.”

"As they're wanting to adopt more open source and Linux across a broader part of the enterprise, they're ... putting a lot more thought into how they're going to govern open source, because it's very different from traditional software in a lot of areas," said Hergett.

“Hergett said HP is now looking to take its internal policies and procedures for open source governance to its customers, and about four months ago began a couple of pilot projects with some of them on legal and license compliance,” adds Rhonda

“The projects are being rolled out through its services department, but Hergett said the company has not yet decided when it will launch legal and license compliance as a full-fledged services businesses within the company. He added this was an industry-wide issue.”

There is much more detail in the original article, which I would encourage readers to take a look at.

It’s still clearly early days as far as HP is concerned, but initiatives like this, as long as they are handled properly, have the potential to make the adoption of open source software more comfortable for enterprises.

It’s a fine line between highlighting potential legal issues and spreading FUD, but HP seems to be on the right side of that line.