For nearly two years, Bruce Perens was a senior strategist for open-source software at Hewlett-Packard ? an evangelist and rabble-rouser on behalf of a computing counterculture that is increasingly moving into the mainstream. Part of the job description, he was told, was to “challenge H.P. management.”

His last day as a Hewlett-Packard employee was 10 days ago. The parting was amicable, Mr. Perens said, but he was fired ? “officially a termination,” he noted. “It came after a long, long warning,” Mr. Perens explained. “The thing that I did that was most hazardous for H.P. is the Microsoft -baiting I tend to do.”

A spokeswoman for Hewlett-Packard declined to comment on Mr. Perens’s departure, citing company policy against making public statements about why individual employees leave.

But, according to Mr. Perens, a handful of forces combined to make his exit from Hewlett-Packard inevitable. After it bought Compaq this year, the combined company became the largest single buyer of Windows for personal computers and data-serving computers, and thus more dependent on Microsoft. A rising threat to Microsoft is GNU Linux, an operating system distributed free and developed using the open-source model in which communities of programmers donate their labor to debug, modify and otherwise improve the code. Read more…

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