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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We can do that. We invest heavily in giving part of our portfolio to open source. We’re developing on Eclipse wherever we can. We’ve Gluecode [an open source application server, acquired by IBM in November]: we’ve put a product into the marketplace as an open source product which competes with part of our portfolio. We’ll adapt wherever the market goes.
Phase one [of our strategy] was the adoption of open standards, which we’ve done and led. Phase two was support for Linux which we’ve led. We’re now in phase three, which is open source, which we’ve led. We’re part of all the key bodies, we’ve invested a lot of money, we’ve put technology into it. But, at this point in time, it’s not yet anywhere near the size of a piece over here, which is companies who want to buy business-critical, robust software.
Would you consider the dual licence model, such as the one MySQL uses, as a potential way to create open source software while still generating licence revenues from customers?
I guess all these issues are being looked at in terms of how you do open source properly in the marketplace. We certainly haven’t committed to any particular route at this point in time because ultimately you have to have a business out of it and even with open source it’s not a charity organisation. People need to work out how to make money out of this. But we’re making sure that we are seen to be taking a leadership position so we’re at the forefront, and as things move we’ll adapt and move with them.
About Fraser Davidson
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