Der Apotheker

Summary: HP has been poisoned by Apotheker, whose long career took place in the "Microsoft of Europe" (SAP)

AS FAR as GNU/Linux at HP goes, the latest news (CEO appointment) is terrible for reasons we gave yesterday, but Microsoft's booster Gavin Clarke pretends that the Windows versus GNU/Linux dimension does not exist at all (HP is a platforms company too) and instead he just apparently tries to make Oracle look bad (Oracle picked Hurd right after HP had ejected him under mysterious circumstances [1, 2, 3, 4]). Clarke for example suggests:

Apotheker's hiring would suggest HP hasn't forgiven Ellison's remarks or forgotten. In fact, it has put a big fat reminder in Ellison's face about who it's dealing with by hiring some SAP blue blood. Apotheker's presence reminds Oracle that HP is its own company and his presence suggests HP will leverage its business' relationship with SAP in joint customers and work to deliver SAP apps on HP hardware as an alternative to Oracle.

Citing articles like the above and also this one, Mr. Pogson is surprisingly optimistic. He thinks that "Apotheker will no doubt have a global view of IT and may be friendly to GNU/Linux on desktop and server. They could increase margins by pushing GNU/Linux instead of that other OS. At SAP, Apotheker had no problem with customers running SAP on GNU/Linux." (as long as it was Microsoft's GNU/Linux, aka "Ballnux"). As the only comment on the post puts it, "If anything, I think Apotheker will make HP more unfriendly to free software. It is really debatable why Hurd was ousted. I happen to think he is removed by Microsoft because he engaged HP in free software “too much”. Acquisitions of Palm and Phoenix Linux BIOS tech as well contributions to GNOME and Linux kernel put HP on Microsoft’s hit list. Microsoft declared HP a threat in SEC fillings. Now Apotheker comes from proprietary company which is Microsoft ally. Make no mistake, SAP is enemy of free software. They feel the burn, and their business practices are incompatible with free software as much as Microsoft’s. SAP had a try when they released MaxDB under GPL, but they abandoned it after some time and continued supporting proprietary version. Since Apotheker lack experience with being a CEO (he was SAP CEO for only about a year) he will probably leave lots decision making to his underlings. And chief of HP software division is a Microsoft guy, appointed right about after Palm acquisition." ⬆

"Where are we on this Jihad?"

--Bill Gates talking about eliminating Linux at Intel