Are there going to be some legal challenges to the General Public License (GPL)?
I don’t know. We take our obligations from all licenses very seriously. I think there are some misconceptions about Linux and the licenses. We are pretty clear in telling customers that their applications cannot be infected by the license of something else. Certainly IBM has a very large non-open-source, proprietary software business. That software runs fine on top of Linux. What areas are ripe for open-source software? Open source is one excellent way of providing IT infrastructure–networking, Web serving services, base application development tooling, client desktops. The things that are generically used by everybody are good candidates. The community is large enough with enough varied skills that you can overlap between the people who want to make the software better and who have the skills to make it better. As you get into the middleware and higher up the stack, that becomes harder to do. The people who want databases to run better don’t necessarily have the skills to make them b
