AlwaysOn: Khosla: Open Source Optimist

“AlwaysOn: What do you think about the whole
Linux movement?

“Khosla: I’m a big fan of Linux. If one
distribution, like the Red Hat distribution, becomes the de facto
distribution, you might actually end up with a closed system. Even
though it’s ‘open,’ if everybody starts writing to Red Hat, which
is sort of happening, then there’s a real danger that you won’t see
innovation and they’ll start charging, which they’ve already done.
And [then] Linux no longer matters.

“UNIX was open until it became Solaris, and then really there
were one or two important versions of Solaris and UNIX itself
became less important–other than that the name Solaris was derived
from UNIX. But nobody cared about UNIX, there wasn’t an open UNIX
[anymore]. I think there’s some danger there won’t be an open
Linux–that’s a pretty important issue that I don’t see discussed
much. I think that’s a pretty real threat…”

Complete
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