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Our Blogs Open Sauce Stormy by name, not by nature
Our Blogs Open Sauce Stormy by name, not by nature | Stormy by name, not by nature |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Tuesday, 05 February 2008 | |
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Page 2 of 4 Her first job was at HP where she didn't start out with open source software. She started in the HP-UX lab, managing the desktop team, the CDE team. Featured Whitepaper
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"I realised that I had a whole bunch of people that were fixing defects for CDE. I thought, we need to be developing new features for this desktop. We need to be giving them some kind of Microsoft Word equivalent. We need to be doing new stuff, and all we were doing was fixing defects. This was about the time that Linux was becoming popular. GNOME and KDE were out there, and I thought, wow, we could just use one of those." HP decided to use GNOME after Peters had convinced her superiors that using it would not mean that HP-UX would have to take on the same licensing. "... I ended up having to convince people in HP that I wasn't going to copyleft HP-UX by putting this GPL software on it. I ended up with a whole new job - helping people use open source software, helping HP learn how to do it, and helping customers figure it out." There are some things about Peters that stand out - she does not like to enter into controversial territory. And she never uses the term "free software", only "open source". That seems to be common to a lot of people today, people who appear to have forgotten where the whole revolution began. She refused to buy into a discussion of why HP chose GNOME over KDE, saying merely that business and technical decisions were involved. And then, since she is no longer at HP she has an out: "There were a lot of different reasons, and I'll let somebody from HP share them with you." As Peters is still on the GNOME Foundation board, I raised the question of the activities of GNOME co-founder Miguel de Icaza, his creating of Linux equivalents of Microsoft software. Her response was: "I don't think it's good or bad. I think if he wants the equivalent of these products on Linux and there's people that will use them and there's a community that revolves around it, I think that's okay." |
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