[ Thanks to Don
Hinshaw for this link. ]
“High tech is not an arena rich in historical irony,
but it has its moments. One came last year, when Microsoft CEO
Steve Ballmer told analysts that Linux, the (potentially) free
software that continues to attract the interest of business
customers, has “the characteristics of Communism that people love
so very, very much about it.” At roughly the same time, IBM, a
company generally not known for its Marxist worldview, threw its
considerable weight behind Linux, dedicating $1 billion to the
software’s development and pledging to invest more than $300
million in Linux services during the next three years. And defense
witnesses in Microsoft’s recent antitrust trial continually cited
Linux as evidence of a robust, competitive marketplace–hardly a
Communist ideal. (For the record, wasn’t it Microsoft’s
distribution of free copies of Internet Explorer that sparked cries
of market abuse in the first place?)No less ironic is that IBM, the company credited with inventing
and using FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) as a means of fending
off the threat of new technology, may help dissolve the FUD that
Microsoft and other firms have thrown around Linux, the operating
system software that can be downloaded for free from various
Internet sites. Linux may not carry the high price tag of other
operating systems, but IBM’s embrace is purely pragmatic. As Linux
gains wider acceptance, it creates a growing market for hardware
and services. IBM, therefore, not only trumpets the availability of
its own Linux-ready hardware, but also makes frequent mention of
the growing number of software applications that can run on Linux
machines. In June, the company counted 2,300 such applications–an
increase of 30 percent from just three months earlier. “A mature
operating system would have 10,000 applications,” admits Daniel D.
Frye, director of IBM’s Linux Technology Center, in Beaverton,
Oregon, but those that are available, he notes, “are the big
ones–like SAP and Lotus Notes.”