“I have long observed that it takes $500M to create and sustain a commercially
viable OS [operating system]. Today we spend about $100M on Linux development
each year. About $50M of that is spent on basic improvements to Linux,
how to make it more reliable. The other $50M is spent on things that IBM needs,
like special drivers for particular hardware or software to connect with it. We
asked the Open Source Development Lab to estimate how much other commercial
development spending was being done on Linux. This didn’t count any university
or individual work, just other companies like us. They told us the number
was $800-900M a year, and that the mix of basic vs. specific needs was close to
50/50. So that $500 million investment [required for an operating system] is also
there now for Linux as well (counting only the basic portion, not the specific
portion). And we only pay $100M toward that. So you can see even from a very
narrow accounting view that this is a good business investment for us.