How an open source community gets built

whether by incompetence or simple inattention to detail or rampant self interest those attempting to play the role of Linux champions put in a less than stellar performance.

I am sure that there are areas where Linux is really supported within IBM. However, it would not surprise me, in the least, to learn there are areas of active disdain to hostility towards Linux within the same company. Nonetheless, I do not see them quite as schizophrenic as Sun regarding this topic nor quite as inept as Novell in stating some of the early plans and poor execution to date.

Linux is bottom up task and we should not look to some large champion to win all the battles. Corporations have contradictory pursuits that may for a time parallel our interests and many other times they will be opposed. And of course, governments can be bought off.

I was at a Linux conference in 1998 at a BoF on Linux Adoption (or something like that). Most people were discussing the grass roots, bottom-up approach, then one guy got up and said we were all fools and said that the ONLY way to get Linux into a corporation was from the top down. He and I bantered back and forth for quite a bit. Eric Raymond is a very interesting fellow... I don't always agree with everything he says, but he does believe that corporate adoption must be top down.

I think it's a combination of both... grass roots works in some areas (especially IT centric companies/orgs) and won't work in others. I think you have to try both ways to see what is effective.

Linux is alive and well at my company. When I first got here, we were a Sun/Windows shop primarily (though we always supported everything). Now we have many desktop users of Linux and we have been known to outdeploy even the Windows team on a quarterly basis. It was certainly a combination of grass roots and top driven direction that made Linux work here.