IBM Exec Downplays Linux Legal Issues

SAN FRANCISCO—The legal issues surrounding Linux “will eventually be forgotten,” according to a top IBM executive speaking Wednesday at LinuxWorld.

Irving Wladawsky-Berger, general manager of e-business on demand at IBM, said that he expects over time that the industry will forget SCOs efforts to enforce what it considers to be copyrighted material at the heart of the Linux kernel. SCO has filed suit against IBM, alleging copyright infringement.
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“I fully expect that the current legal issues will be eventually resolved and forgotten,” Wladawsky-Berger said in a keynote speech here Wednesday morning. “Throughout history successful technologies are remembered, but few remember the inevitable bumps on the road on the way to success.”

Wladawsky-Berger compared the sharing of open-source software to the collaboration among scientists, building on one anothers achievements to advance science. “At some level that is all open-source software is,” he said. “If you want to work with each other and collaborate with each other, there is a need to see each others code and work with it and use it. I dont think its much simpler than that.”

In four-and-a-half years, Wladawsky-Berger said, IBM has moved from a handful of customers to thousands, and now all of its own applications run on the Linux operating system.

He highlighted the recent win at The Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), Arizona State University (ASU) and the International Genomics Consortium (IGC), which selected IBM as their technology provider using a 512-node IBM eServer 1350 cluster running Linux to power life sciences research for genomic research. Charles Schwab has also taken advantage of grid computing to cut its automated response times on wealth management applications down from four minutes to 15 seconds, Wladawsky-Berger said.

In the fall, IBM will debut a new ad advocating the benefits of open source, titled “The Future Is Open”.