[ Thanks to KevinmReichard for this link.
]
“…The old money is starting to take an interest in Linux,
and no matter what you think of it, it’s a little pathetically
comical, like disco night at the old folks’ home. Or midlife
crises, when men who ought to know better do things like buy
motorcycles and marry beautiful, much younger women (though in at
least one case I know of — me — this has worked out pretty
well).“
“Yet it’s probably more than that. Deep down inside, even the
once ultra-straight IBM has undergone some fundamental changes. I
remember a meeting one evening in 1994 that I arrived at directly
from a sailboat I’d been racing for the last few days. I had
two-years’ growth of hair, two weeks’ growth of beard, and was
wearing ratty grey sailing shorts, a teeshirt commemorating New
Zealand’s Steinlager II sailing team, and boat shoes with no socks.
The meeting was heavily populated by IBM employees, one of whom
asked me during a break, without even a hint of sarcasm, “So. Are
you an IBMer?” (I wasn’t. But she told me that in some departments
IBM had come to resemble Apple in the old days.)”
“The motives, I think, haven’t changed much, and, really,
there’s nothing wrong with that. Companies exist to produce things
from which they can generate revenue, hoping that some of it is
profit, and from that they pay employees who then do things like
eat and sleep indoors and buy computers.”