Upside: IBM: World’s fastest Linux company

[ Thanks to Kevin
Reichard and ll for this link.
]

“When a copied version of the project’s early results reached
Rohrbach’s inbox, Rohrbach says he was immediately intrigued. He
decided to follow up on the request and see if the project held any
promise. To say the rest is history might be overstating things a
bit, but the recent announcement that IBM was releasing an official
S/390 version of Linux shows how quickly a 100,000-employee company
can move when the markets and technology communities are in perfect
alignment.”

“In the success-has-many-fathers world of corporate management,
it isn’t too difficult to find Linux-backers within IBM nowadays.
Still, talk to most of them and you’re likely to hear the similar
analogies. In a company whose internal bureaucracy once evoked
shades of Kafka, the level of “pushback” in relation to Linux, and
open source software in general, has been surprisingly
minimal.”

“It’s been a fun experience,” says Daniel Frye, program
director for IBM’s Linux Technology Center. “The executives were an
easy sell. Their only question was, ‘How quickly could we become a
market leader.'”

Complete
Story