An Evening with Bruce Perens

We know that both Hewlett-Packard and the other members of CompTIA were sponsors of the so-called Software Choice Initiative, which works against open source. So, it's important to watch our friends.

I'm wondering if it's time for a grass-roots enterprise Linux, and the way I figured I would do this... is first of all take Debian, why is there a Fedora project when there's Debian, a ten-year-old project with all its policies done...with over a thousand developers? That is what the Fedora project should be. Take that, and get together the community of enterprise users who depend on Linux and really want a zero-cost enterprise distribution.

I wanted to take the emotion out of the whole thing, and it looks like we're succeeding at that. I'm not tremendously happy to have coverage of Debian and FSF bickering, we have a lot more important things going on.

I think that it's going to take care of itself more or less now. You probably will have some conference calls that are exciting... I'm not asking either organization to compromise with each other, I'm asking each organization to follow their own rules. I feel that it's not permissible for Debian to compromise its ethos for FSF nor is it permissible for the FSF to compromise its ethos for Debian and resolution of this issue does not call for either.

It's something I'm still thinking about. I think I will go ahead and do a call for people to work on it. Obviously I'm open for people who want to discuss it. The project is not yet announced. I really debated this in my own head for weeks now, and part of the reason was that, I feel that it's a big personal expense to me to do any large project. On the other side every open source thing I've ever done has paid back much more than I've put into it... I feel that I must participate because I'm one of the few people in the community with the cachet to pull this off, who can talk to all the people on the executive side and all the people on the community side and has reasonable credibility with both of them. That doesn't mean I have to run it, definitely doesn't mean I want to be its CTO, it does mean I would be evangelizing it publically for quite some time.

I'm thinking about whether it is time for the community... to provide directly a Linux distro certified to LSB and to proprietary software providers that are willing to do so, guaranteed to be free software and free beer, free speech and free beer. A certified distribution that is zero cost, free software... and I'm convinced that creating a Linux distribution is a expense-sharing system rather than a profit-making system, even Red Hat now admits this as they attempt to offload production of their distribution to the community.

I have a scale for commercial collaborators with the community. It has four points. It runs benefactor, partner, user, parasite. Benefactor: NASA's a great example. They funded most of Linux's Ethernet drivers at one time. At that time they were not able yet to make extensive use of Linux, now they are. They put in more than they got out. Most companies would not want to be benefactors, it looks bad to your stockholders.

Partner is what companies should be if they expect the cooperation of the free software community. At Hewlett-Packard, we could not get them to help us with the IA-64 kernel until we made the printers work. Very good lesson for companies, we put out 60 printer drivers on Linux because of that.

User is a company that makes use of Linux and open source that complies with the licensing, but does not make any contribution unless they just can't avoid it. The usual GPL. I put Linksys in the user category if they finish resolving the issues they're working on with the FSF right now. Linksys is a division of Cisco, a very big company, that's important.

Parasite, SCO comes to mind. They're making fraudulent claims to get value out of the Linux and open source community by kiting their stock and you can quote me on "fraudulent," "libelous," "slanderous," no problem with that. Other parasites, well who sold Linksys and Cisco that wireless access point? A chip company with a "B"... a number of engineering companies that seem to be in Taiwan and Korea, transfered intellectual property that was not theirs to Linksys and Cisco, in ways that did not comply with the licensing, leaving these companies whose goodwill we want out of compliance with our licenses and they don't know how to resolve the problem. So I don't like it because those Taiwanese or Korean companies made us enemies with Cisco when we want those guys to put Linux in their next product, we just want them to comply with the licenses and they should have been given full directions for doing so when they bought those WAP designs.

Yeah, I wish Eric hadn't written that, actually. At least not quite the way he wrote it, because first of all not having worked at HP as I have, Eric doesn't understand how long a company can run on a legacy product which is an extremely long time. And, secondarily, I think Eric was angered by things Sun has been saying about Linux not belonging in the data center and Sun's explicit collaboration with SCO spreading FUD. However, Sun also helps us. Remember what I said about corporate multiple personality disorders. They've done $70 million dollar investment in OpenOffice, and I don't see where it paid off for them. They bungled the strategic aspect of it, they need help with it, but it was a very large contribution to Linux and open source. So, first of all, Sun's not going away, they're not dying. If anything, they'll be acquired. They're still a company with some value, and obviously their price is becoming more attractive. Who will acquire them? I think it's either Microsoft or IBM.