IT-Director: Playing the Linux Game, By Email

“The Linux Game works like this: Players compete to make their
business commercially viable in a world of Open Software. There are
no rules.

“IBM has done well playing the Linux game. Although in theory
Linux doesn’t belong to anyone, in practice it belongs to those
that can profit from it most and thus it belongs most to IBM. It
belongs to Hewlett Packard and Dell too of course. It doesn’t
belong to Sun Microsystems much and it belongs least to Microsoft.
Just to confirm this, Steve Ballmer recently said, yet again, that
Microsoft will not port its products to Linux…

“IBM can make money out of Linux by using it to sell hardware,
and it has done so to great effect. Linux revived the mainframe.
About 20 percent of IBM mainframe sales are down to Linux. More
remarkably, about 65 percent of its blades in its new BladeCenter
sell with Linux loaded at the customer’s request. IBM claims to
have sold over 10,000 blades this year, which means a good deal of
Linux…”

Complete
Story