To help nudge Linux and open source software further into the enterprise, a vice president at Hewlett-Packard Co yesterday called on rivals IBM Corp and Sun Microsystems Inc to invalidate their open-source software licenses in favor of a free licensing model.
During his keynote at the LinuxWorld Conference in San Francisco yesterday, HP"s vice president of open source and NonStop Enterprise Martin Fink commended the Open Source Initiative on setting up new rules to limit the growth of open-source licenses.
Fink also congratulated Intel Corp for being the first company to "openly and proactively" deprecate the open-source license it had created. He urged others to "stop the proliferation of open-source islands" in the form of licenses, "because if we didn"t do that then we would be in a situation where we have a bunch of open-source [products] that can"t talk to each other and can"t share - and sharing is the foundation of what makes open source works," Fink said.