3000 Jazz content transfer a big task
February 12, 2009
Hewlett-Packard released the contents of the Jazz Web server to the 3000 community last month, but it may be a few more before the software HP copyrighted can be downloaded for free. Along with Client Systems, Speedware negotiated a re-hosting license to distribute the materials, but one time-consuming task for any re-hosting licensee could be erasing HP's footprints from the field of programs and papers.
For example, OpenMPE Web coordinator Matt Perdue, who maintains the servers where Jazz programs are also in the process of finding a home, said that HP's logos and HP internal links have to scrubbed out of any Jazz paper or presentation, with the exception of not-easily-edited PDF files. The HP materials represent the cream of the milk of Jazz kindnesses. One re-hosting resource will clean up and send out HP's work first.
Speedware's Nicolas Fortin said his company will be hosting some, but perhaps not all of Jazz. "Our plan is to use a phase-based approach," he said, "where the first phase will be to make available the HP content we are allowed to host as soon as possible."
Significant parts of the Jazz contents were created by individuals, however. Re-hosting those programs means getting agreements from each of the creators.
HP insisted, as part of its re-hosting agreement for its copyrighted Jazz content, that every re-hosting site that wants the HP programs must acquire the rights to the independent programs if that third-party software was to be included on a Web site like Speedware's.
"The agreement we have with HP is bound by a legal contract," Fortin said, "which states that we are required to get permission from all authors of third party software and open source software before we can host related content and files, which could take a bit of time." HP's permission is a blanket approval for its materials.
"Subsequent phases will be timed with acquiring the necessary permission from multiple sources to host open source and third party author software and content," Fortin added.
OpenMPE, which is waiting on HP to finalize its re-hosting contract, has downloaded all the materials, although HP is going to provide a set of DVD disks with everything included. "As far as I know, we have all of Jazz's contents," said director Donna Hofmeister. "All the pages need to be edited to remove the HP references — a fair amount of work indeed!"
Perdue said he did a download of Jazz contents while the software and papers were hosted at HP — something which the vendor advised its customers to do. Now he's got "most of the [needed] directories up on our server. What I'll be doing once we get it online is asking people to verify that they received downloads properly." Software downloaded via the FTP wget command arrives safely, but Perdue said re-hosters have to watch for problems in moving such files back onto another 3000.
Preliminary tests have already been conducted through the OpenMPE server to others that Perdue hosts. "Some things want to go FTP by binary, and others want to go FTP bytesteam," he said. "We'll have to ask individuals to check the links once we make the software available for download."