taylor@limbo.Intuitive.Com (Dave Taylor) (11/28/89)
In a recent article, Tai Jin (tai@iag.hp.com) brings up some vitally
important points that are not only relevant to HP and HP's customers,
but to the computer industry at large (in my opinion, of course!).
He comments on the situation where public domain software is ported
by an HP employee onto the HP platform but then someone in the company
decides to make it a part of the product line, so the ported version is
not then made available to external customers; they have to wait years
(sometimes) for the product version. Worse, some times the product ends
up not being a part of the actual release, and any hopes of people having
the original PD software on their HP machine just sorta vanish...
The other issue is the question of how to disseminate information/public
domain software to the customer base (especially Uni customers) once it
has been established that either someone other than HP or someone within
HP with appropriate releases has accomplished a port of the program. Tai
echoes many suggestions about setting up an FTP site, citing specifically
the one the Chris Maio at Columbia University is alleged to be running.
Well, I'll go backwards with my own thoughts here; support the Columbia
FTP site by contributing to it, but most importantly, join the INTEREX
HP users group organization special interest group on HP-UX and jump up
and down until INTEREX sponsors an FTP/dialup/BBS archive site!! You also
must remember that lots of sites, like Intuitive Systems, do not *have*
access to FTP archives, so while there may be some great FTP archives
set up, many of the most crucial customers might not be able to access
them at all (and this holds true of Universities too; not all can afford
to be connected on the Internet).
INTEREX has already released one contributed software tape that has had
many hundred useful and interesting programs and scripts to aid in the
running, administration, use, and amusement factor of HP 9000 computers,
and if we can convince the organization to find a computer somewhere on
the actual Internet and add a few telephone lines & modems, well, who
knows... it'd be nice to have a single point to check for software, wouldn't
it?
Further, Hewlett-Packard donates many dozens (hundreds, actually) of
computers to different Universities through their University Grants
Program and their University Philanthropy Program too. With the
former, many even come with cash grants too, to foster research and
development on the HP platform. What if... one of those grants were
to include the responsibility of setting up, running, maintaining,
and advertising an archive service? What if that also was done in
conjunction with the INTEREX HP-UX group?
I think that'd be a graceful and advantagous solution to this problem,
one that allows HP themselves to be involved in the archive site in a
manner appropriate for HP to be able to later point customers at the
archive (ask any SE, by the way, whether they'd like this sort of thing
available), PLUS it would be clearly *not* an archive such that software
obtained from it would be de facto supported by HP or any of their
organizations.
Shall we say that we're throwing down the gauntlet for someone within
HP to pick up? ;-)
Also, regarding the delays inherent with productizing software, it
again seems to me that HP is wasting some excellent resources by not
making the initial ported version of the packages available to their
higher-tech customers (e.g. those that are on the Internet and would
spend the time and effort to find the archive sites, get the software,
configure it correctly, and in all probability help debug it). A
cycle of;
1. software is submitted to the network at large
2. someone from HP (or external, of course) picks up
the package and ports it to the HP 9000 platform.
3. they move a copy of the initial port to the HP FTP archive
4. they post to "comp.sys.hp" and "comp.sources.wanted" (?)
about the availability of the port
5. others pick it up and hack on it, continuing to improve
the quality not only of the original program, but of the
port too.
6. meanwhile, HP internally is also working on the package for
productization. They keep a close track of what is going on
in the public forum, incorporating whatever changes they
can into their version. Simultaneously, whenever they find
"show stopper" bugs they make publicly available patches.
7. End result:
the public version continues to improve in quality
the product version ends up as solid as possible
AND ends up almost identical to the public version
The last bit is worth emphasizing too; if there is going to be a divergence
of people public and private working on a package, it's very important that
the package continue to look the same in both areas. A counter example is
the evolution of the Elm Mail System -- the HP internal version was pushed
in almost completely different directions to the public version, and we now
have two divergent copies that cannot be easily reconciled. One can just
imagine the headache system administrators are going to have when they
get HP-UX 7.0 with Elm builtin; should they stick with the public version
that people already use, know and like, or should they go with the HP
product version which is like a whole new system completely?
Basically, then, I propose that when HP is working on productizing a public
domain product that they make great efforts to keep the public community
informed of what they're up to, including code changes, and simultaneously,
HP keeps *very* close track of what other changes are bubbling in the public
version of the program too.
After all, a fiasco like the 'perl won't compile on HP-UX' does nothing to
improve our HP stock value :-), and, perhaps more seriously, makes the
company and their product look very poor, much worse than they really are.
The other side of the coin, programs written within HP and never to be
released as products, well, that's something for HP people to take up with
their management; it's certainly counter-productive business-wise to NOT
make them publicly available, but the channels to offer them are much more
tricky than from non-HP people...
In passing, it's worth mentioning that Tai is also a one-man dervish of
porting effort, and he has written a lot, and ported a lot of networking
software onto the HP platform in the past few years. Yet he cannot
release any of it to the public, to the people that ask for it. It's
like playing "what's wrong with this picture?" sometimes...
Late morning thoughts from,
-- Dave Taylor
+-------------------------------------------------+
Contact Information:
INTEREX, the Int'l Assoc of HP Computer Users
585 Maude Court
Sunnyvale CA 94088-3439
(408) 738-4848
HP-UX chairman: Art Gentry
<att!attctc!kcdev!gentry>
Chris Maio, Columbia University
<maio@cs.columbia.edu>
+-------------------------------------------------+
Intuitive Systems
Mountain View, California
taylor@limbo.intuitive.com or {uunet!}{decwrl,apple}!limbo!taylor