Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Fri 17th Aug 2007 06:06 UTC, submitted by sharkscott
An interview with IBM's Vice President of Open Source and Standards about their Open Source Strategy, the recent pledge of its patents for more than 150 open software standards, his take on the ODF vs. XML issue, and much more in The LXer Interview of Bob Sutor.
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2005-07-08
Open source and standards allows IBM to profit no matter what software solutions a customer chooses. For IBM, FOSS is a hedge bet. If their home-grown solutions stop selling, they'd much rather customers adopt open solutions than competing proprietary solutions.
The most important thing for IBM is that the applications that customers want integrate nicely with IBM's hardware and middleware. Consider SOA, for example. IBM loves the idea that a customer can buy a dozen proprietary applications, and they can still sell them the underlying platform that ties them all together.
IBM likes open source because it creates the commonality that they need to jack up a customer's IT environment and stick IBM technology underneath. Maybe a customer will start out with Linux on System X. As they grow, they can move to Linux on P. If they need more reliability, switch them to AIX. If they need more capacity, then they can't beat Linux on Z.
Keep the applications, replace the platform. That's what open source and standards brings to the table for IBM.