This video is pretty interesting and got me to think about IBM’s relationship with the open source community.

IBM is able to take what is being done for free in the open source community to further their own business. This is a very interesting concept because IBM has to pay $0 for the software they can turn around and offer at a price to customers and vendors. In most cases, they need only attribute ownership to the proper authors. The company is banking on the flexibility and wide support of Linux to further its business products. I use Linux on my servers and have had a tremendous amount of success.

The key idea here is that by using what tools are freely available and updated, IBM is able to cut down on development costs (as well as gain geek-cred with IT managers).