As vice president in charge of Hewlett-Packard's Linux strategy, Fink says HP's decision to indemnify its customers against lawsuits that the SCO Group files has been a boon to sales. He also sees HP making inroads with its Linux products against Sun Microsystems' Solaris operating system.
Fink has been with HP for 18 years, holding a variety of positions in hardware and software support, consulting and telecom sales. He serves as vice president of the board of directors for the Open Source Development Labs, a global consortium of industry leaders dedicated to enabling Linux. He also wrote the book, The Business and Economics of Linux and Open Source.
CNET News.com recently caught up with Fink amid his extensive travels to talk about the future of Linux and Unix.
Q. How much is the SCO suit affecting customers? Is it scaring them away from using Linux? Have you lost any customers as a result?
A: The reality is that the Linux market overall is growing. What we were seeing was the market continued to grow at 30 percent to 40 percent. At the same time, we were talking to CIOs who were looking at getting Linux deeper into their enterprise, and they were starting to get concerned about the risk.
Even though a number of them might say SCO doesn't have a case, the fact that they can get sued means they can incur a cost. You have to defend yourself. With the HP indemnification, we said, "we'll take accountability for the solution, and we will defend and take over the costs of the defence." That has had a dramatic effect in terms of the moving customers over the fence and forward with Linux.
How did the indemnity provision come about?
We didn't do this on a whim. There was an extensive amount of due diligence. We took an analysis of the risk profile and said we were willing to accept that risk on behalf of our customers. If you look at what some of the others did, IBM and Red Hat countersued. But from a customer's perspective, that didn't solve the problem. The indemnity solved a real problem today. It had a real customer impact today.
