LinuxToday.com.au: Interview with IBM’s Linux Business Strategist

[ Thanks to renai43 for this link.
]

“Q:Many of the things you have mentioned in
your keynote speech as being strengths or benefits of running
Linux, such as good compliance with industry standards, community
involvement, a common application environment, and the ability to
be deployed on many hardware platforms, are also strengths common
to other open source operating systems such as the *BSD variants.
Why did IBM choose Linux as it’s open source platform?”

“A:We’re working with the open source community
– we’re involved in a lot of open source software, but our
customers are really demanding Linux over other open source
products. The demand for Linux is coming from our customers.
However, we have over 200 engineers worldwide working with the open
source community, and they have been making contributions to
FreeBSD and other projects.”

“Q:I guess I wondered about that because Linux
does have a very restrictive license – the General Public License –
all modifications which IBM makes to the Linux source code must be
re-released back into the community, whereas under the BSD license
you wouldn’t be obligated to release those changes back, which
would be less restrictive for IBM. But if there is a demand is
coming from the customers, obviously that is the way you have to
go.”

“A:The only danger with that model, is that
you have several companies now who have the capability to make
their own little modifications, and you almost start getting back
into the old Unix model, where things become proprietary, and
people don’t have free access to it anymore, so that’s the only
danger. We really want to focus on addressing that
problem.“

Complete
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