Leading, but carefully
- Article 11 of 16
- LinuxUser & Developer, April 2006
Rob Buckley finds out how Big Blue is finding life with open source, and how it mixes idealism with pragmatism
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For example, there’s the one-man-shop kind of opportunity who haven’t typically been IBM’s biggest customers. Our heritage typically has been in the big customers, although we have been very successful in small and medium businesses. If the way to get into that marketplace was via a different route, whether that’s Software as a Service or a small open source application and there was a good business reason to do it, absolutely we’d do it.
But you have to be careful you don’t eat your own lunch and you don’t launch stuff that competes with your own core business. What we’ve found interesting is that where we have put stuff into open source and we’ve been very honest with customers and said there’s an open source alternative which is ours, they’ve looked at the business benefits of taking that versus the business benefits of taking the more robust and functional product and they’ve said, “Actually, we want this one anyway.” It can be a door-opener for people to consider you and they may then actually decide on the other product.
Will you make all your software open source in future?
We believe that there is a place for free software and you can have a business around that and supporting that. It could be an attractive business going forward. But the marketplace isn’t yet mature enough that people are willing to bet their business on it.
One of the great things about being in IBM is we’ve got such breadth that when the marketplace changes, we can adapt to that. If you were a company that only sold one type of software and an open source competitor came up with something that was as good as yours and free, you’d go out of business. You have to adapt.
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