So what does the CEO of the world’s fourth-largest software company think about an open source phenomenon like Linux? Well, for one thing, that the “open source” side of things is not the interesting part. What has Sanjay Kumar all fired up is the enthusiasm CA’s enterprise customers — mainframe users who wouldn’t give Linux a second glance two years ago — suddenly have for the platform. And Kumar should know what the mainframers are thinking — they make up about 50 percent of CA’s business. That enthusiasm (for Linux, not free software) has caught on at CA, which claims it will have over 50 applications ported to Linux six months from now. Linux Magazine’s Adam Goodman, JC Freed, and Robert McMillan caught up with Kumar in New York at the January 2002 LinuxWorld Expo to ask him about Linux in the enterprise, the GPL, and the $64,000 question: whether or not IBM should do its own distribution.
LINUX MAGAZINE: What did you first think of Linux?
SANJAY KUMAR: My first question was, can I make money from this? I mean, that’s what this is all about, right? And I had to be convinced. If you want me to say, “Sign up to invest in this thing,” somebody has got to convince me that the world is going to support this platform. And it took a few rounds to get there. It was as much…
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