Open Source capitalists

[Guilherme C Roschke]

> 
> Right, but despite Carrol Cox's insistence that there is nothing new
> under the sun, there does seem something new here. It is old news for
> companies to take technologies from universities and then put to them
> use in commercial applications. But the company is then in charge of
> the commercial application. Here, things are almost reversed. IBM will
> be taking orders from others, partly the on-campus crowd that does so
> much of the work. Unless IBM can find a way to order students to do
> just what it wants, it will have to bend with the on-campus fads. More
> so, nothing can get into the Linux Kernel without the approval of
> Linus Torvaldos, and he is notan IBM
> employee. Though that could change in the future, of course.
> 

	almost, but not quite the whole truth.  IBM will not be taking
orders from others -- the GPL isolates IBM from that.  If things start to
go in a direction IBM does not like, they can base their code around
current versions. If IBM needs something done -- something that the
campuses aren't doing -- it will do it itself.  Not much different than
what IBM already does with AIX, except now they will probably release what
they do under the GPL.

-gr