Decrying the proliferation of open source license varieties, an HP executive on Tuesday urged IBM and Sun to abandon their own licenses and back the GNU GPL (General Public License).

The existence of too many types of open source licenses could cause interoperability problems, said Martin Fink, the vice president and general manager of HP NonStop Enterprise Division, Open Source and Linux Organization.

Fink made his remarks during a presentation at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo .

In a somewhat tongue-and-cheek request, Fink called on IBM to deprecate its IBM Public License in favor of the GPL. In return, he pledged to give an HP laptop loaded with Linux to IBM executives, including IBM Vice President Irving Wladawsky-Berger.

"I also want to ask [Sun Chairman and CEO] Scott McNealy and [Sun President and COO] Jonathan Schwartz at Sun to deprecate the CDDL [Common Development and Distribution License] and re-license Solaris 10 under the GPL," Fink said, eliciting applause from the audience.

"Similarly, I'll give Jonathan and Scott each an HP laptop, but those I will preload with Windows," Fink said, generating laughter from the crowd.

While stressing the importance of open source licensing, Fink warned of the potential incompatibilities resulting from too many license types. "What's been happening, however, is a proliferation of a number of licenses that can call themselves open source," said Fink. "This was originally done to try to grow the open source movement."

Fink cited Intel's decision to deprecate its own open source license and said that the Open Source Initiative has implemented rules to limit the ongoing proliferation of licenses.

In an e-mail response, a Sun representative lashed out at HP.

"Instead of sniping from the outlands of participation in the open source community it'd be real nice to see HP try and take a run at dislodging Sun from the number one slot as contributor of code among commercial companies. If that were to happen, perhaps Mr. Fink would realize that there isn't one hammer for all nails and not one license for all projects," Sun representative Russ Castronovosaid in a statement.

IBM could not provide a response in time for publication of this article.

A LinuxWorld attendee sided with HP's Fink on the issue of licensing.

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