Whats the state of the open-source market today?
Linux is the big brother. Linux has fought all the hard battles to get the keys to the car and stay up late. There’s this funny [ramp] to adoption in open-source where you have a very high barrier. The perception to open-source [used to be that] it’s dirty — nice IT managers don’t do that. But once the developers started playing with it, [there] was definitely a bottom-up movement. What’s going on now is the reverse. It’s a top-down movement. It’s really the [top executives] now that are saying, “Hey, wait a second. We’ve tried this open-source thing in production, and it works. The support is supposedly there. Let’s make this the corporate standard.” Q: When did you see that change? A: About a year ago. We called it the “roll it out” phase as opposed to “trying it out.” Web servers or file servers [where open-source software was already being used] aren’t mission-critical. Application servers [are]. We power the reservation engine for Travelocity. We monitor the power grid here at Ca
