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I’ve been working on a story all week on the mess at HP caused by the all-at-once and probably premature announcement they’re dropping WebOS, smartphones and consumer PCs. One trouble, I keep having to go back and rewrite stuff, because the story is still very, very fluid and new aspects keep popping up almost daily. On Monday, Bloomberg Businessweek announced that HP’s chief communications officer, Bill Wohl, will be moving to a “special assignment.” Chief Marketing Officer Marty Homlish will be picking up the slack with the corporate communications team and Lynn Anderson will take care of PR’s day-to-day operations, at least for the time being. According to the Bloomberg, both Wohl and Homlish have a history with CEO Leo Apotheker that predates his tenure at HP:

Obviously, much thought went into the decisions to stay in Raleigh and in deciding where in the city to relocate. Since we’re located just up the road from them, in Winston-Salem, we were able to infiltrate their organization with one of our agents, code name Ms. Dos, who was able to discover the Top 10 reasons why Red Hat is moving to downtown Raleigh.

Although the main reason for this purchase was to beef up Google’s patent portfolio to help them defend Android, there’s been tons of speculation in the press about Google’s other intentions with this acquisition and how it’ll affect their relationship with their Android partners. I intend to offer my own two cents worth in an article next week. Until then, I’ll tell you I don’t think this is going to have a negative effect on Android makers in the least. In fact, it should remove some of the roadblocks that are being constructed by the patent trolls.

This move was so brazenly weird that we decided we’re going to hear even more wild and crazy announcements from HP in the near future, so we put our brains into overtime figuring out what we might expect. Here it is, the top 10 announcements to expect from HP CEO Leo Apotheker..

As a FOSS supporter, I’ve often found myself POd by actions taken by Steve Jobs, especially in recent months as he’s pulled-out his patent portfolio and declared war on Android. However, I’ve never viewed his actions through the same lens as I’ve used to see the anti-FOSS moves made by the likes of Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer or Larry Ellison. Indeed, I’ve always viewed Jobs as something of a kindred spirit and have understood that his commitment to protecting Apple has been brought about because he knows what it’s like to be ripped off by the likes of Microsoft. It’s happened to him in the past and he’ll be damned if he’s going to let it happen to him again. I like Jobs. I admire him. But he still pisses me off sometimes.

Evidently this move comes because company execs see a need for HP to reinvent itself as a services and software company, much the way that IBM did when they spun their consumer PC business off to Lenovo a few years back. In hindsight, this shouldn’t be entirely a surprise, as Apotheker was chosen as CEO last August partly because of his software experience with SAP, where he had an eight year history, two as CEO.

Gosh, how the time flies when you’re having fun! Here it is, Thursday again, time for another Top Ten list. By now, we fully expected that we’d have heard from David Letterman or his lawyers about this, but we’re beginning to suspect he doesn’t even know we’re here. Just in case, however, we’re keeping all of our legal answers ready.

When I first wrote on this story on April 5th, I expected that pressure would be put on Google and that Android would quickly be brought back into compliance with the GPL. That hasn’t happened. Pressure might have been placed on Google, I don’t know, but if so it’s done no good. Four months have passed and Android still isn’t compliant. Thankfully, it seems that era is now over, and the organizations that enforce the GPL are going to have to go after Google and all Android vendors for these violations.

A few weeks back when we did our list on the Top 10 Reasons to Switch to Windows, we were taken to task by a commenter for being too hard on the Microsofties. Well, as Three Dog Night said a long, long time ago, when it comes to Redmond, we find it “easy to be hard.” Anyway, this week, we’re taking that commenter’s advice and, in the interest of equal time, we’re going after our own kind, Penguinistas. So, here it is, just to prove that we don’t always pick on Windows, ten things that Linux users don’t understand.

The House will soon be considering a bill that will require ISP’s to maintain logs of their customers Internet use for a 12 month period. As I understand it, the law would include a customer’s browsing history, credit card numbers, etc. The stated purpose of the proposed law is to catch pedophiles visiting child porn sites, but everybody who knows anything about the Internet agrees it won’t be very effective at doing that. What it will do, if enacted, is bring Orwell’s “Big Brother” vision a little closer to home and make your network connected devices look even more like telescreens than they do now.

We still haven’t heard anything from David Letterman’s lawyers, so we figure he’s cool with us stealing his IP. If he sends us one of those “cease and desist” notices, we’ll just claim that the rights to the Top 10 list were given to us by NBC, who said he abandoned them when he bolted to CBS. Anyway, we’ve discovered that the list is a teeny bit funnier if you read it aloud, pretending you’re Mr. Letterman, right Paul?

The Zen Cart ecommerce application, which was initially a value added fork of osCommerce, doesn’t seem to be affected. Kim Elliott, one of the founding members of Zen Cart, told me, “As far as I know there hasn’t been a problem. As long as you have our latest version and file permissions set correctly you shouldn’t have any issues.”

Finnix is designed for system administrators. It can be used to mount and access hard disks and partitions, probe networks and more. It’s small enough to fit on a single mini-CD, doesn’t include a GUI, office tools or sound support. However, it does seem like it would be a useful distro to keep around, just in case. Bill Dwyer has posted a review of this distro.

Anyway, they’re in the record books now, and I’ve got a new trivia question to throw at some of my know-it-all techie friends.

Ironically, up until that time, Novell and Microsoft had been archenemies, and much of Novell’s market share loses had been due to Redmond’s aggressive marketing. At the time of the SUSE purchase, many in the FOSS community had high hopes that Novell would become an open source asset, even though they had shown a proclivity in the past for snatching defeat out of the arms of victory. All hopes were dashed, however, when they embraced their old enemy with a deal they had to know wouldn’t set well in the FOSS world.

Google may be willing to negotiate, however, as they’re suddenly remembering once talking to Sun about licensing Java for Android and recollect that Sun had offered a license for a mere $100 million. Anyway, it’s becoming pretty evident that Google’s probably going to pay something, but don’t look for it to be a deal breaker for Android. That’s another fight, that involves Apple, Microsoft and HTC…

As soon as Oracle announced they were offering OpenOffice.org to The Apache Software Foundation, there went up a collective sigh of relief from the FOSS community. Some, no doubt, would have preferred the project to be turned over to the folks at The Document Foundation, whose members had worked with the code for the better part of a decade and who’d already done a bang-up job improving OOo with their fork LibreOffice, but you don’t always get what you want, and Apache is an open source organization not lacking in credibility. At least now OpenOffice is out of the hands of Larry Ellison, who is a friend to open source the same way that a fox is a friend to a chicken.

Is it really a news story that IBM has decided to support OpenOffice.org? Considering the fact that Oracle’s move to push the project over to Apache was at Big Blue’s prodding, I’d say not. Still, at least now the players are clearly defined. In addition to lending moral support and giving Larry Ellison a shoulder to cry on, IBM is also donating the code from IBM Lotus Symphony.

Quite a few years ago, a popular Linux site began displaying ads from Microsoft on their home page. Big ones, at a prominent location above the fold. Some were fancy Flash ads, attention getters, mainly for branding purposes. Others were FUD, “independent” TCO studies bought and paid for by Redmond that “proved” it was cheaper to hand MS a wheelbarrow of money to run a Windows server than to run a free Linux server.

Does Microsoft actually hold valid patents being infringed by Android? Who knows? That would be for the courts to decide and, so far, nothing’s gone to court. OEMs are just ponying up and buying MS licenses on the strength of Microsoft threats. So much so that Redmond is evidently making more money on Android than on Windows Phone 7.

My response to this news was to go into denial. This couldn’t be, I told myself. The magazine wouldn’t let it happen. eWeek without Spencer Katt would be like Kellogg’s without high fructose corn syrup. When the next week’s issue arrived, I quickly turned to the page where I would normally expect to find Spencer’s purrings, only to find some boring article (an opinion piece, I believe) in it’s place. I felt betrayed. Spencer Katt had deserted me.