Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) is not the first technology company that most people would think of to play the role of strong corporate champion of Open Source Software. HP's reputation, such as it is, is that of a perfectly respectable but somewhat gray corporation. The company's technology is strong but not showy, and its products tend to be found in conservative corporate and laboratory settings, rather than in the freewheeling academic (much less hacker) communities where Open Source has its roots. For a company as button-down as HP, Linux, Perl, Apache and the rest of the lot all seem a little too unzipped.

It is a tribute both to the strong grassroots pull of Open Source, as well as a new sense of adventure and risk-taking inside HP itself, that the company has become an aggressive backer of Open Source in recent months. On March 1 at the LinuxWorld Expo, HP announced the creation of their Open Source Solutions Operation (OSSO), which will work to drive Linux adoption in enterprise and Internet software-development environments. HP hopes to pull this off by providing the tools, technologies, and solutions to facilitate application development on Linux.

HP is a diverse and distributed company with many autonomous business units. When Wayne Caccamo, director of HP's OSSO, first got involved in pulling together HP's Linux strategy (after doing an inventory of HP's current Linux capabilities and offerings), it was clear to him that the company could be a strong Linux-based business solution provider if they could better align their Linux systems, software, and services strategies. As head of OSSO, Caccamo's challenge is to ensure that the individual division strategies are coordinated so that HP can present comprehensive solutions to their target customers.

These efforts by HP are in some ways being mirrored at most other big computer companies, as part of the recent move towards corporate adaption of Open Source Software. Netscape Communications Corp. was one of the first companies to make a move; early last year, it made available the source code to its browser. IBM also made headlines in the summer of '98 when it announced it would be working with the Apache Group. Oracle Corp. has said it will port its mainstay database products to Linux. And Linus Torvalds has even spent many hours at Silicon Graphics Inc. (now just "SGI"), helping that company incorporate Linux into its product line. Among the many reasons for the interest: Linux helps them equalize their relations with the Microsoft Corp.

The Open Source Business Model

The growth of Open Source in general and Linux specifically, as evidenced by established proprietary companies' interest in this area, is not a surprising phenomenon. What sets Open Source programs like Linux apart from traditional commercial software is that its source code -- the human-readable instructions that (when compiled) tell a processor what to do -- is distributed with the software. Programmers are granted the freedom to modify the code to suit any purpose they desire, and they can also suggest changes or improvements to the freely distributed end systems. Such unlimited flexibility has become a powerful lure to corporate information technology managers.

Also, while traditional companies have operated within a centrally organized structure, the Open Source community has operated more like a diverse group of organisms working toward a common purpose. This new model is outlined by Thomas Petzinger in his book, The New Pioneers:The Men and Women Who Are Transforming the Workplace and Marketplace.

According to Petzinger, this new model operates under the assumption that people- instinctively want to improve, collaborate and economize. In this way, through independent local actions, people create what he calls "global order without central control." This lies in stark contrast to the proprietary model, where development has been conducted in a structured, command-oriented environment.

So, like most of its competitors, HP is making a move towards Open Source not because of any sudden conversion to collectivist economic principles, but instead to pursue its self-interest. As Caccamo has noted, software such as Linux and Perl is wildly popular in some of the computer industry's fastest-growing markets, notably among Internet Service Providers (ISP). Like other server and workstation providers, HP has long targeted ISPs as a key growth area. In the last year, it became clear that the company couldn't sell many computers there if it didn't support these software alternatives. "Linux has emerged as a platform of choice in markets that are of strategic interest to us," says Caccamo. "We need to increase our penetration of the ISP market, and Linux is a requirement."

Caccamo has worked at HP for ten years, mostly in marketing the company's business machines. He has been called on throughout his career to serve as a kind of early radar for emerging technologies. When commercial interest in Linux began escalating early last year, Caccamo was the natural choice to look into the phenomenon, and to prepare an HP response. Now, his job is to be the eyes and ears of HP in the Open Source community and to coordinate the sprawling company's numerous Open Source efforts. "Operations at HP are fairly autonomous," he said. "If someone like me wasn't doing this job, people at HP who were interested in Linux would be working in a vacuum, without knowing how they were part of a bigger picture."

It is important to note that while he is technically savvy, Caccamo approached Linux from a business perspective, rather than an engineering one. He still doesn't use Linux himself, for example -- a fact that may give him less credibility in the Linux world but more credibility inside HP, since he is not viewed as any sort of techno-zealot. In the course of looking into Linux, he was schooled in the ways of Open Source by several HP employees who are well-known in the Linux community. For example, David Mosberger, an engineer in HP's lab, tutored Caccamo in some of the cultural subtleties of Open Source. Mosberger was known to kernel developers for his work porting Linux to the Alpha chip -- contacts that came in handy when HP had a "Linux Day" for its lab engineers.

Ironically, another reason for HP's support of Linux involves the company's desire to sell more machines based on its own UNIX, HP-UX. How so, exactly? The company hopes that certain enterprise software developers will use Linux on HP for their development machines and then switch over to HP-UX when the time comes to put the code to everyday use. To enable that to happen, the company is trying to make its Linux development environment second to none. But according to Caccamo, HP-UX is still better suited than Linux to the needs of the high-end corporate "data center," at least for now.

Finally, HP's push to Linux has yet another motivation. The company sees the Open Source movement as the "next big thing" in computing. Thus, moving swiftly and early on Open Source is a chance for HP to make up for seeming to be late on the last big thing in computing: the Internet. While the explosion of interest in the World Wide Web helped sell billions of dollars in HP printers and computers, the Web did little to increase general marketplace perceptions of the company. That's in stark contrast to Sun Microsystems Inc., a fierce HP rival that has been basking in the glow of its various Internet efforts, notably the Java programming language. And IBM has undertaken a highly successful marketing campaign to convince corporate buyers that it is the name to trust when it comes to electronic commerce.

HP's embrace of Linux was not especially difficult. For one, the company has long supported multiple operating systems, notably Windows NT and HP-UX. "We have always had a very open approach to development strategy," says Caccamo. "We have never been very religious about that." In fact, far from envisioning HP as a single OS company, Caccamo sees HP as taking a thousand-flowers-bloom attitude to operating systems. "Our ultimate vision for all of this is that in the future, our customers will be buying a service from us, like an information service or a commerce service," he says. "That means they ultimately aren't going to know about or care about what OS is the engine for that service. Linux could take over front-end Web and e-mail serving, while HP-UX might be the host for very high-end applications, and NT might be best of breed for groupware. For customers, it won't matter, because we will be selling them a service. And as far as operating systems go, we almost have an obligation to give our customers a choice."

The Puffin Group

As OSSO looked over the Open Source projects under development, Caccamo was pointed at a project that had been started by the Puffin Group, an Ottawa-based consulting firm that had begun work on porting Linux to HP's PA-RISC processor. (PA-RISC stands for "Precision Architecture Reduced Instruction Set Computing".) This was precisely the type of project OSSO felt should have HP's support and a decision was made to help the Puffins out.

The Puffin Group was founded in September 1998 by Christopher Beard and Alex deVries in Ottawa, Canada. Beard and deVries, both in their mid-twenties, had been freelance Linux hackers who could barely afford to attend Linux conferences. With the operating system's explosion, however, the duo have positioned themselves to take advantage of the situation. As we have mentioned, Open Source operates under a completely different business paradigm from proprietary companies, and the Puffins hope to serve as a nexus.

Much of the work for Puffin projects is done almost spontaneously during weekend "summits," hosted by Beard and deVries and sometimes attracting programmers from firms such as Oracle and Netscape. As the duo explained to the Ottawa Citizen, ideas are basically brainstormed, tasks are distributed, and the whole thing is then knitted together by the end of the weekend.