[luau] News - Bruce Perens fired due to anti-Microsoft advocacy

[Warren Togami]

New York Times reports that Open Source evangelist Bruce Perens has been
fired by HP due to his anti-Microsoft advocacy.  Sorry about the New York
Times link, they require free registration in order to read their article.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/09/technology/09SOFT.html
For nearly two years, Bruce Perens was a senior strategist for open-source
software at Hewlett-Packard - an evangelist and rabble-rouser on behalf of a
computing counterculture that is increasingly moving into the mainstream.
Part of the job description, he was told, was to "challenge H.P.
management."

His last day as a Hewlett-Packard employee was 10 days ago. The parting was
amicable, Mr. Perens said, but he was fired - "officially a termination," he
noted. "It came after a long, long warning," Mr. Perens explained. "The
thing that I did that was most hazardous for H.P. is the Microsoft-baiting I
tend to do."

A spokeswoman for Hewlett-Packard declined to comment on Mr. Perens's
departure, citing company policy against making public statements about why
individual employees leave.

But, according to Mr. Perens, a handful of forces combined to make his exit
from Hewlett-Packard inevitable. After it bought Compaq this year, the
combined company became the largest single buyer of Windows for personal
computers and data-serving computers, and thus more dependent on Microsoft.
A rising threat to Microsoft is GNU Linux, an operating system distributed
free and developed using the open-source model in which communities of
programmers donate their labor to debug, modify and otherwise improve the
code.

...

Yet beyond the postmerger atmosphere at Hewlett, Mr. Perens also says that
he had been taking a more outspoken stance against Microsoft recently.
"Microsoft is out to crush Linux as a competitor," said Mr. Perens, who
became truly galvanized after the emergence in May of a Microsoft-backed
industry group, the Initiative for Software Choice. Besides the chip maker
Intel, a close Microsoft ally, most of the other 20 or so members are
smaller foreign companies or trade organizations.
(continued in article)