IBM's Interest in Red Flag Linux

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Monday September 25, 2006 @01:14AM from the blue-and-red-is-purple dept.

eldavojohn writes "For those of you unfamiliar with Red Flag Linux, it's an OS for the growing Chinese community of Linux users. Interestingly enough, IBM is looking to support Red Flag Linux as the next distribution of Linux that its more than 300 applications will run on. Support from a huge vendor like IBM certainly raises the rate of adoption of a distribution of Linux so this is certainly good news for Red Flag Linux and also the Chinese open source users. IBM currently supports Red Hat and SUSE Linux, which creates twice as much testing for each of their applications. Will Red Flag Linux cause them to require three times the amount of normal testing?"

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Re:Serious Question -- Why? by Americano · 2006-09-25 02:35 · Score: 2, Insightful

I think you just answered your own question about why:

The company has released something like 2 distributions over the last four years or so while being heavily funded by the Chinese government.

It's funded by the Chinese Government == lucrative government contracts == profit.

IBM is in the business of making a profit. If doing so results in a net contribution to open source software, then good for IBM & good for OSS. If doing so doesn't result in a net contribution to open source software, you'd be wrong to think that IBM gives a toss, so long as they're still making money.