HP Pay Cuts - an unfair act of economic opportunism and greed.

Damian Saunders writes:

HP’s CEO, Mark Hurd announced, on the 20th February that he would be implementing a company wide cut in pay for all employees. Starting with a reduction in his own salary by 20%, followed by senior executives who would take a drop between ten and fifteen percent, regular employees 5 percent and exempt employees 2.5 percent. All this in reaction to a 13.5 percent fall in the company’s first quarter profit.

[...] First we need to put Mark Hurd’s 20% salary cut into perspective, remember he is only taking a cut to his base salary ($1,450,000) which amounts to a $290,000 drop. Seems quite reasonable until you examine the following, publicly available, information. Mark Hurd’s total compensation in 2008 was $42,514,524 [...] a 68% increase in the total package from 2007 to 2008. [...] So, the question is; what’s the significance of his stated 20% cut in base salary? I would suggest next to nothing. [...] Put bluntly, 6 people at the top of the HP pyramid accounted for $142,774,325 in compensation in 2008 alone. That is an obscene amount of money.

[...] Let’s look at the plight of the HP employee. The first thing we have to consider is that, unlike Mark Hurd, a 5% cut in salary is in fact a 5% cut in total compensation. Someone on a salary of $65,000 would be losing $3250 per year before tax, or $270.00 per month. Some would say this is a small price to pay for keeping your job but I think holding that gun to an employee’s head is outright exploitation and can not be condoned, especially when they have already been exploited enough for the sake of high profit margins and Mark Hurd’s stellar career performance. Ask a majority of HP employees about their current remuneration and you will be lifting a rock that you don’t want to look under.

I recommend you read the rest of the post, and spend some time browsing through the many comments. You will get a pretty good idea of the morale of HP employees these days.

HP DE200C Digital Entertainment Center

I finally took some time to put back together my good old trusted HP DE200C Digital Entertainment Center, and I thought I would share the result:



In my opinion, this is a good illustration of the kind of innovation open-source brings. The software stack is pure free and open-source software. That allowed me to add my two cents contribution (driver for the Vacuum Fluorescent Display, support for the remote-control and front-panel keys).

But equally important, it shows the kind of innovative hardware that Hewlett-Packard was putting together back in 2001, seven years ago now... Kudos to Lee Devlin and other people who gave us this great toy.

The source code for my little contributions can be found at http://repo.or.cz: the Noritake VFD driver, the LCDproc changes and the Linux kernel changes. I had some trouble pushing the git repository for the last one, so here is a patch against 2.6.26, which may be easier for most.

Science and the fear of innovation

Michael Nielsen writes:

The disincentives facing scientists have led to a ludicrous situation where popular culture is open enough that people feel comfortable writing Pokemon reviews, yet scientific culture is so closed that people will not publicly share their opinions of scientific papers. Some people find this contrast curious or amusing; I believe it signifies something seriously amiss with science, something we need to understand and change.

The whole article is worth reading. It suggests the same kind of innovation I am hoping for in science. Right now, scientists often congratulate themselves for open science. But as Michael and others point out, arXiv is not exactly a model of openness, at least relative to standards such as open-source software development.

Enough hot air...

I just came across this article on Advogato:

Once upon a time in the not-too-distant past, a hacker I know blogged about using object-oriented C to implement a lightweight imitation of some of C++'s features for his latest project; almost immediately, somebody saw fit to reward this charming piece of acceptably self-congratulatory writing with a stern and quite public deconstruction. Does this scene seem familiar? Why does this keep happening? And what, if anything, can we do about it? We can hardly hope to appease all of hackerdom's malcontent — but we can at least try to avoid stepping on each other's toes.

Amen to that. Remember, a few days ago when I wrote an article indicating that I agreed with an earlier post by Eric Raymond. Only to discover, a couple of weeks later when I returned to read Raymond's blog that he had a new piece that fell just short of calling me a "blithering idiot".

Had I done anything to merit that? Apparently, my sin was to remark that unless you are famous like Eric Raymond, it's hard to make a living purely from open-source, and that consequently, genuine open-source innovation is hard to find. Instead, I think that innovation generally attributed to "open-source" is still very much driven by corporate interests. I have personal reasons to hold that particular opinion (having put an innovative programming language in the open-source domain, being offered to work on open-source project multiple times, but never on my own project...) I find it surprising that it deserved being attacked by Eric Raymond so unnecessarily, even less so when I agreed so much with what he had written...

There is a psychological explanation

I read recently an explanation for that frequent behavior on the net. Apparently, the mechanisms that we use to throttle and moderate our social interactions are based very largely on visual cues, and they are very complex (they show up quite late in the human development, typically maturing in one's late teens). When we don't have these visual cues, our brain's moderation system doesn't quite work as it should, neither on the sender's nor on the receiver's side.

So, based on this explanation, it is likely that Eric Raymond read much more of an attack in my original post than I intended, whereas if we had been speaking face to face, he might have seen various expressions on my face that might have convinced some part of his brain that I was not that critical of open-source, that I was not implying open-source folks cannot innovate, that I was not downplaying his own intelligence.

Conversely, when he started writing, he used very scalding words like "blithering idiot" (even if he downplays that initial statement a few words later with "reasonably bright"). It is unlikely that he would have used such words in a face-to-face discussion, if only because our brains know very well how quickly a bad choice of words can lead to a non-verbal response or even physical harm... So when you talk to someone, you rarely say to anybody "you are an idiot", even if you really believe it.

... or is there?

When I first read that psychological explanation, it convinced me almost entirely. Since then, though, I noticed something interesting. Letters written on paper tend to be very polite, very nice.

So it seems that something else than just "not seeing the other guy" is at play. Writings between scientists of the early twentieth century, for example, are sometimes heated discussions between people who often squarely fall into the "genius" category. Yet I don't remember any "flame", any "hot air". Maybe that's just because I'm not familiar enough with these writings.

But the other possibility is that our modern society doesn't value politeness as much as it used to...

Stability and innovation

Two days ago, I attended a conference in Paris on the future of virtualization in mission-critical environments. There was a presentation from Intel about the roadmap for Itanium and virtualization.

Stability vs. Innovation

Two things in this presentation reminded me of what Martin Fink calls the Unix paradox:

1. Intel pointed out that Itanium is mission-critical, so they tend to be more conservative. For example, they use processes for Itanium that have already been proven on the x86 side. Like for Unix, there is a similar paradox for mission-critical processors.
2. The cost equation is very different for mission-critical systems. For commodity hardware, the acquisition cost tends to dominate your thinking; for mission-critical hardware, it's the (potential) cost of losing the system that drives you. So whereas in volume systems, you are ready to pay more for innovation, e.g. features or performance, in mission-critical systems, it's for stability that you pay more.

Following the recent discussion with Eric Raymond, I thought that was yet another interesting angle about what "innovation" means to different people.

One step at a time, or "TIC-TAC-TOC"

Intel also reminded us of the TIC-TOC model they now use to release CPUs:

• TIC: change the process on a stable micro-architecture
• TOC: change the micro-architecture on a stable process

I think that a similar approach applies to how our customers want to upgrade their mission-critical software, something that I would call TIC-TAC-TOC:

• TIC: Change the infrastructure (e.g. machines, disks), keep OS and applications the same
• TAC: Change the applications, keep infrastructure and OS the same
• TOC: Change the OS, keep infrastructure and applications the same

Customers may, at their discretion, decide to do multiple steps at the same time. For example, they may use an infrastructure change as an opportunity to also upgrade their OS and applications. But as a vendor, we should be careful not to force them to de-stabilize more than one thing at once. It should be their choice, not ours.

When innovation is the problem

Historically, HP has been good at this. TIC: You update from PA-RISC to Itanium, and you can still run the same OS, still run your PA-RISC applications. TAC: Upgrade the applications, keeping everything else the same, and you get a healthy speed boost. TOC: Upgrade to 11iv3, another speed boost; Install HP Integrity Virtual Machines and you get the latest in virtualization features, even on 2002-vintage Itanium hardware. As far as I know, you can't virtualize a POWER4, and you can't get Live Partition Mobility on a POWER5 system.

But TIC-TAC-TOC is not a perfect solution. That model is painless for customers only if we can convince them to stay reasonably current in two out of three dimensions at any given time. That model breaks down for a customer who runs HP-UX 10.20 on PA-RISC and obsolete applications. Such customers feel left behind, and the leap of faith to move to current technology is so big that they are an easy prey for competitors.

So here is my interpretation of Martin Fink's Unix paradox:

Stability + Innovation = Disruption

How to solve that equation is left as an exercise for the reader :-)

Genuine open-source innovation is hard to find...

Eric Raymond responded to one of my earlier posts. It was not one of his best days:

The easy, cheap reply would be to write the author off as a blithering idiot who has failed to notice that his entire environment has been drastically reshaped by open-source innovation, and the proof slaps him in the face every time he looks at a browser. The easy, cheap reply would be to write the author off as a blithering idiot who has failed to notice that his entire environment has been drastically reshaped by open-source innovation, and the proof slaps him in the face every time he looks at a browser. But, in fact, I think he (and others like him) are not idiots; they are reasonably bright people making a couple of serious and identifiable errors in their reasoning about open source, closed source, and innovation.

Uh?

Eric Raymond makes a fool of himself with this post. To begin with, he quotes only a fraction of my “screed”, later makes fun of “M’sieu de Dinechin”, and barely avoids calling me a blithering idiot. I’m honored he later revises his judgment and ups me to “reasonably bright”…

Yet for all the name calling, ESR totally misses my point: developers need to eat, and corporations provide vast majority of the necessary funds, even to open-source contributors like ESR or myself. My XL work is all open-source, but I would not have been able to afford it without a regular source of income. That’s my point, and if ESR wrote a single word to address it, I didn’t see it.

As for claiming that open-source build the world-wide-web, sorry Eric, but that’s bollocks and you know it. I could not even find any evidence that Berners-Lee’s browser, WorldWideWeb, was open-source at the time. What everyone knows is that Berners-Lee worked for CERN at the time, in other words he had a stable revenue, and that only reinforces my point. The browser that ignited the web was not Berners-Lee’s (nobody could afford the incredibly expensive and closed-source NeXT machines that ran it) but Mosaic. And as I pointed out in my “screed”, the source code of Mosaic was public, but not open-source by any standard definition. More importantly, it is silly to ignore all the corporate contributions that made the web what it is today, from Netscape to Microsoft to Cisco to fiber-optics to ISPs…

It is legitimate to say that “Tim Berners-Lee invented the world-wide-web”. I think it is even OK to say that hackers built it. But that’s a far cry from “open-source built it”, which seems to be what ESR would want us to believe…

Ultimately, I’d say that Eric’s error number zero is to confuse “ideas” with “innovation”. Innovation is ideas made real.

Factor, an interactive extensible programming language

An interesting overview of Factor, an interactive and extensible programming language:


The language is available here.