Businessweek Covers Linuxworld

MadFarmAnimalz writes "BusinessWeek has coverage of Linuxworld up, and it makes interesting reading in places. Amongst things touched upon are the open-source business model, how vendors will be tempted into locking in customers into their offerings, and other things." I'll be out there tomorrow for the Golden Penguin Bowl, as well as judging exhibitors. Busy day.

Comments

Linuxworld 2003 news links

[dietlein]

Computerworld

Cnet

Internetnews

Infoworld

And, of course, Microsoft Watch.

Re:"How do you make money....."

[rgmoore]

Besides making products that support Linux on a whole, how are they supporting the market share of the linux community?

One thing that they're doing is helping developers to improve the Linux kernel to improve its performance for tasks that their customers consider important. They've contributed their journaling file system, and they're currently working on improvements to Linux scalability to make it possible to run Linux efficiently on SMP and NUMA systems with very large numbers of processors. They're also working on the applications software side; ISTR that they've been a contributor to Apache development.

And, of course, that's just IBM. Other major hardware vendors have contributed to other Free Software projects that they see as strategically useful. Sun, for instance, is a major supporter of GNOME because they see it as a viable replacement for their crusty and outdated CDE desktop. Intel has contributed to GCC and (IIRC) the Linux kernel, specifically to help give them better support for the IA64 architecture. NeXT and now Apple have contributed to GCC; Objective C was built on top of GCC back when it was just the Gnu C Compiler. Those are just some examples, mind you. I'm sure that there are plenty of other hardware makers who have contributed to Free Software because it makes plenty of business sense for them to do so.