Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2000 13:28:36 -0400
From: "Eric S. Raymond" <esr@snark.thyrsus.com>
To: carly_fiorina@hp.com
Subject: Open letter to Carly Fiorina and HP

Ms. Fiorina, we in the open-source community are very pleased to hear
you acknowledge that "The open source movement is natural, inevitable
and creates huge benefits. It's part of the next wave of computing,
and that will involve participants and users within the industry in
open source."

You've talked the talk.  Now, can you walk the walk?

A good, easy first step would be for HP to open a website giving
access to complete interface specifications for its entire printer
line, including its WinPrinters.  Even before you began to understand
the benefits of open source, making life more difficult for
third-party software developers could only have had the effect of
shrinking the potential market for HP's hardware.  We frankly don't
understand why those specs haven't been on line for years already.

A good, not quite as easy second step would be to release your printer
driver sources.  We understand that this would require an IP-rights
audit on the code, which will take some time; but an immediate
commitment to release all unencumbered sources would mean a lot more
to us (and to your customers!) than general talk of the goodness of
open source.

Your most difficult challenge will, of course, be deciding what to do
about HP-UX.  Your version of Unix is aging and has long suffered from
compatibility woes.  I know through personal contacts that there is a
large and vocal faction in HP engineering that would like to see HP-UX
end-of-lifed and replaced with Linux (or one of the open-source BSD
Unix versions).  

Whether you do that or open-source HP-UX itself won't be an easy
decision.  The community would accept either choice; but I suggest to
you that joining the Linux coalition certainly represents HP's best
chance of maintaining a market position free of Microsoft's strangling
grip.

The Open Source Initiative is willing to help you develop effective
licensing, release, and community-relations tactics; that's what
we're here for.  We'd like to support your open-source strategy.  But
there needs to be something more than words for us to support.  While
we recognize and applaud HP's continuing contribution of engineering
time to open-source projects such as Samba, the bottom line is that HP
has yet to open-source any significant portion of its own code even in
those areas where it would be easiest and most obviously beneficial
for the company to do so.

You'll find that open-source developers are eager to welcome HP to the
fold, and can be extremely valuable allies in growing your markets and
increasing your product value.  But you'll also find that we're
rather cynical about ringing endorsements; we've heard those before
without result, and they won't earn you a lot of cred by themselves
without actions and commitments that back them up.

Show us the code, Ms. Fiorina.  That's where the real cooperation starts.
-- 
					Eric S. Raymond
				President, Open Source Initiative