IBM's top Linux expert (page 3 of 3)

It's hard to imagine a product that needs to communicate that doesn't start out with TCP/IP. If people are building some kind of Web server, Apache has far and away the most popular following, so people always start with Apache as the Web server of choice.

Now what we are seeing is more and more that—everything else being equal—people will pick Linux as their starting operating system for their new application, especially a brand-new business that may be leery about license fees and royalties.

Plus, Linux is supported by a large ecosystem and you have people learning about it in universities around the world. On top of that, Linux is very inexpensive. You essentially only have to pay for support.

Therefore, Linux has become part of the standard that's taken more or less for granted, especially for many new products, businesses and vendors. You may wind up saying, "OK, for this particular product maybe I need AIX, maybe I need Windows, maybe I need z/OS or maybe Solaris."

But the starting point of the conversation is Linux. So, in that sense, Linux really has become a standard operating system. And the fact that it runs on every single microprocessor and runs on systems from small, embedded ones to nodes in very large supercomputers means that it has wide applicability.

I might add that Linux will even run on architectures that haven't even been developed yet. The implications are huge; that's why Linux has continued to develop a bigger and bigger following. Month by month and year by year, more and more applications become available on Linux and more and more businesses use Linux.

Q: How does Linux migration enable customers to focus more on innovation and companies to become an On Demand Business?

A: Well, I think that by embracing Linux in the infrastructure, customers get a certain freedom. For example, often customers pick Linux because they want the freedom to run it in a small distributed system and later move it to a partition in a large mainframe or partition in a big pSeries* or iSeries* [system].

They don't need to think very hard about it with Linux. They know that freedom is there. That freedom then lets customers focus their energies where they are needed: on customers, the right business processes, greater efficiencies and the right business model.

Q: What kind of influence is Linux having on grid computing?

A: Linux has a very big influence on grid computing. First of all, a lot of the same communities that are at the leading edge of grid computing—the world of research, universities, supercomputing—are the same communities that have embraced Linux.

So there is a natural affinity for grid to be built on Linux. Even though one of the powers of grid protocols is that they run on every single operating system, they don't need to run on Linux. Then, like Linux, the grid protocols are developed in an open community.

So again we have very smart people from around the world in a community collaborating on development. It's the same powerful model that's so appealing in the Linux community and it's being applied to the grid community. I think that over time we'll learn what kinds of changes to make in Linux to better support grid computing, especially some of the virtualization requirements of grid computing.

We'll see features like the POWER hypervisor moving into Linux or even related products. So, there's a lot of affinity both for cultural reasons as well as for business reasons.