A Linux Bun in HP's Oven; Firefox and the EULA Hounds

I wish the commentary on the issues with Mozilla's licensing were not so belittling, like people are getting in a tizzy just for the fun of it. Trademarks, copyrights, and EULAs are all legal documents with teeth and real consequences if you ignore them and go "lala, whatever you say is fine!" It's especially interesting in regards to the Firefox EULA because Mozilla admitted it was full of errors. How's that for ace legal work, sheesh. Almost as ace as Google rubber-stamping their EULA on every darned thing whether it's appropriate or not, like they did with Chrome. Considering what lawyers charge for their time and alleged skills, these seem like red flags that say "Replace lawyers with new ones that pay attention."

Well at least tracyanne got quoted in the article. Congrats TA.

That being said the whole thing was moot before this article was even published. There won't be a EULA. See http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20080919113727960 for the rest of the story.

> "Replace lawyers with new ones that pay attention."

They could probably even get lots of free legal advice concerning the problem from the FSF or on Groklaw if they simply asked.

Of course, the old caveat that free advice is worth what you pay for it applies.

Quoting: Of course, the old caveat that free advice is worth what you pay for it applies.

It doesn't appear their paid legal services are providing any advantage.

So their seems to be parallels between paid legal services and paid software support?

I haven't been able to find much news about HP's rumored Linux distro. Having a company that produces hardware either work on fitting an existing distro (Dell and Ubuntu) or creating a new one is intriguing. In HP's case, it would be a way to extend their branding beyond the case and into the OS itself in a way they currently can't/are not allowed to in Windows.

Would they base it on a current distro? I've read that HP does a lot of support business for Debian users.

That's what I've been wondering too. Are they going to pull an Apple and build a proprietary locked down system on top of *nix? Or are they going to build/tweak a distro to make it friendly and easy (however they define that) and keep it open?

IMO, there is no need for HP to build something closed...and it would make little sense to use Linux if they wanted to do that, since it's GPL and BSD is...um, BSD. Simply having a Linux distro like Red Hat and having update servers (complete with codecs, etc) would be enough, and they could easily compete with Apple on usability and "coolness". They could even roll access to an online music store into the distro. There's a lot that could be done with such a setup, I'm surprised that no one has done this yet. I would have expected Sun to have done something similar, although they might be heading that way with OpenSolaris (but they have a long way to go to make that usable as a desktop). Sun makes great hardware and I think they could make something that would be a little on the expensive side, but top notch quality. And given HP's recent financial woes, not paying a Windows tax on each unit would have to add up considering the volume of machines they sell, wouldn't it? Even a dollar a unit would be a ton of money.

I would guess Debian, Red Hat or Mandriva-based. Or they could just buy someone, like Mandriva or Xandros.

HP, The real HP not the compaq part of HP, is an old guard Unix vendor. HP Unix is a pretty powerful contender.

The other two major Unix vendors, IBM and Sun, are having flings with Linux. Maybe HP is just playing follow the leader?

Are you talking about HP-UX?

Just a few years ago, it was the weakest of the Big 3 proprietary Unix products (Solaris, AIX, HP-UX). Granted, there's "doing one thing and doing it well," but there were lots of gotchas that developers had to work around (check any configure script for special-case handlers specific to HP-UX).

Even kernel tuning was well-nigh impossible without a rebuild, and that too was pretty opaque. Let's see if I remember it right: edit a config file, type "make kernel" or else just "make", and then reboot and hope your configuration options didn't result in an unusable system. The look and feel of this approach resembles old-school *BSD style, something Linux hasn't needed since... well, almost the beginning.

Disclaimer: I understand the H-P developers did get a green-light to create system management closer to modern capabilities; I don't know how many admin tools are new since 2005.

HP could easily do a deal with Red Hat or Novell, or even Canonical.

They could also pledge to work with the Debian or Fedora projects.

I suspect that they would prefer to start with one of these distros as a base and build their own modifications on top of it.

My best guess is that they'll do nothing.

Quoting:My best guess is that they'll do nothing.

Mine too. It's all P1ss and W1nd.