> There was a brief article today on osonline stating that IBM was giving up
> its unix OS and switching to Linux. That has interesting implications. The
> Open Source movement is the most successful communal effort ever at building
> something of value. Now a large capitalist power wants to stake its future
> on that movement.
>
interesting, indeed. apart from sun, the unix vendors have been leaning strongly towards linux for quite a while and even sun has started making noises about linux support recently. from a technical perspective their participation thus far has been benign and some might argue beneficial. of course that might be no different than the famous microsoft "embrace of death" - such as when microsoft partially adopts an open standard only to abandon it after gaining market leadership in the space.
isnt this just the next step (a bigger one than the ones before) since o'reilly started making money off of publishing books about free software and red hat et al started doing the same by selling it? open source leaders like eric raymond have put forth pragmatic arguments in favour of a productive marriage of the open source effort with commercial products and *interests*, in stark contrast to what they consider the utopian position of richard stallman, the father of the free software foundation (on whose products linux and other open source software are built).
--ravi