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HP Looks to Expand Open Source Services

Posted on: Thursday, 24 May 2007, 06:00 CDT

Hewlett-Packard is seeking to expand its budding open source services business by targeting some of its customers' key concerns - notably governance of open source software.

The company began its push into open source services last year, but about four months ago appointed Randy Hergett as director of engineering of its open source and Linux unit to drive new initiatives.

Among his targets are open source legal compliance and licensing, which is one of the biggest challenges of open source governance that HP customers face, Hergett said in an interview. "As they're wanting to adopt more open source and Linux across a broader part of the enterprise, they're ... putting a lot more though into how they're going to govern open source, because it's very different from traditional software in a lot of areas."

Hergett stopped short of saying legal compliance and licensing were a major hurdle for enterprises looking to expand their open source infrastructure. After all, the average growth rates for Linux are about 15% a year, he pointed out. Open source performance, security or stability or any of that "baseline stuff" are not the issue. Rather, questions around compliance and licensing seem to be on the top of customers' minds, he said.

A big part of the problem facing enterprise open source users is there is no standard open source license like there is with traditional software, Hergett said. "You don't click an "I accept" button and accept an end-user agreement...with a lot of open source packages and Linux distributions there can be literally thousands of licenses buried in there," he said. "So just identifying what licenses are there and understanding them and trying to figure out if they comply or not is very difficult and very complex."

Hergett said HP is now looking to take its internal policies and procedures for open source governance to its customers, and about four months ago began a couple of pilot projects with some of them on legal and license compliance. The projects are being rolled out through its services department, but Hergett said the company has not yet decided when it will launch legal and license compliance as a full-fledged services businesses within the company. He added this was an industry-wide issue.

HP had developed a software tool to deal with open source licensing and legal issues internally, and is now considering licensing that tool to customers or helping customers customize a comparable product for their own internal use, Hergett said. HP's tool basically works by searching through a set of source code and identifying various phrases that indicate the code is likely a license, he said. At the back-end is a database that collects the license information for each version of the code.

HP currently isn't offering the tool to its pilot customers, and Hergett said it wasn't certain it would. At the moment, HP is mostly consulting with those customers, he said. "There are a lot of different ways to solve this problem," he said. "We're trying to evaluate what we have internally."

The company likely will formulate a clearer picture of how its open source legal compliance and licensing services business will look during the next couple of months, Hergett said. But it doesn't seem close to making any announcements any time soon. And whether legal and license would dovetail into the company's existing open source services, such as middleware, maintenance and product lifecycle, remains to be seen. "This is the first time we're really talking about the legal compliance and licensing part of that," he said.

Governance around lifecycle management remains a sticky issue for some larger customers also, he said. Knowing when to install what version of an open source product and how often to upgrade is becoming more of an issue as enterprises move up into some of the open source middleware stacks and other applications, Hergett said. Of course, standard Linux distributions from Red Hat, Novell and others solve that issue in some cases. But in other circumstances, enterprises are seeking guidance on what policies to put in place and this is a service HP has been offering on a limited basis to its pilot customers during the past six months or so, Hergett said.

Hergett's department also is spending much time on the management of virtual machines, including making HP's Virtual Manager run natively on Linux, and enabling Xen and other open source plug-ins on its Virtual Manager, he said.

Also, Hergett expects to add another 10 or so open source organizations to the more than 30 that HP currently supports, during the next 12 months. "We may swap out as well," he said, pointing to the constant evolution of the industry. He said HP was still evaluating which ones it would or wouldn't support.

Source: Datamonitor

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