Sysadmin

IBM may spend over $1 billion on Linux in the next few years -- including Big Blue's current ad campaign -- but Hewlett-Packard is quietly making statements of its own to the Linux community. Within the past two weeks, HP has made a couple of announcements that are of particular interest to Linux users: one about the release of new print drivers and one about a new print appliance.

When Bruce Perens joined HP last year, the first question that many people from the Linux community wanted to ask him was, "Where are the drivers?" That question has finally been answered. On March 20 HP released source code to drivers that provide at least basic print support (normal text and best photo quality) for some of its popular Deskjet printers, and full support for other models. The source code release serves as testimony that Perens is not, as some have suggested, just another pretty face giving lip service to the values of the open source and free software communities.

HP has made the drivers' source code available online (see Resources for a link). The code, which works on printers as old as the Deskjet 600 and as current as the 990C, falls under a number of licenses; some drivers are licensed under the GPL, some under the LGPL, and some under a BSD-style license with the caveat that users may only employ the code with HP printers.

Linux print server appliance

On the same day, HP announced the release of its HP Print Server Appliance 4200. But in the blurb posted on HP's Website, a big part of the story was left untold. The 4200 -- codenamed Nautilus during its joint development by HP, Jeremy Allison, and the rest of the Samba team -- replaces the Jetdirect 4000 print appliance. The HP press release states that, "The HP Print Server Appliance 4200 supports Microsoft Windows 95, 98, NT, 2000, Millennium and Unix clients." It also stresses that it provides "drop in" (point and print) addition of printers to a network. What it doesn't say is that the 4200 runs on the Linux 2.2 kernel and Samba.

Allison told me recently that "Nautilus" is proof positive that "HP gets it." A contract with VA Linux and Linuxcare brought Allison's Samba team together with HP during the development process. Allison credits HP's intensive structured testing with yielding huge improvements for the Samba package, meaning that those improvements will be of value to all Samba users, not just those who purchase a 4200.

"[The members of the HP test team] were told that Nautilus should work just like NT. Anything they discovered in testing that didn't do exactly that was reported as a bug," Allison said. He noted that during the course of the joint development effort there were conflicts with the proprietary source code management system used by the HP developers and CVS, which the Samba team uses. He noted that at the urging of the Samba team, the HP developers "upgraded" to CVS.

If it keeps contributing code, contributing structured testing, and delivering Linux-based products to the market, HP soon will be recognized as an open source player.