Ah, the anti-corporate bias runs wild sometimes doesn't it?
Or perhaps you could simply view it as a research project which never went commercial. If
this were code written by some poor grad student and actually was way less feature complete,
would this perhaps be more easily blessed as noble and a great contribution to free software
instead? Bright ideas are many, solid implementations are few and marketable ones even fewer.
Instead of writing papers, HP "showed us the code" even if they never marketed it, is that
really so sad? Are we that blessed with free code that we should sneer at them so easily?
Thank you HP for your contribution, I believe that many will value it.