TD: It's like nailing a jellyfish to a moving train.

SH: If you actually read all the words, the Peace, Love, and Linux campaign says that we are pleased with Linux. I think you see a lot of hardware vendors who are feeling trapped. Who cares who's operating system it is; if it's popular, we want our hardware to run on it. We weren't allowed to port or couldn't port, for instance, Windows NT to the 390. We can do Linux to the 390. And so, we now put Linux on the entire eServer line! That's why we like Linux!

TD: I wanted to ask you about plans on the iServer. There are a couple of special Linux things going on for the iServer. It seems to be optimized for doing Web serving and e-commerce. Is that falling into your bailiwick in the Linux campaign?

SH: I'm the software guy. I also actually manage the relationships with all of our distribution partners, such as Red Hat. We have distribution contracts with Red Hat and SUSE and TurboLinux to port to the entire eServer line, including the iSeries. They have committed to do zSeries, which is the mainframe, iSeries and pSeries, in addition to xSeries. And they've now shipped that. So, we have just announced the availability of the iSeries including the Linux.

TD: So, if a customer comes in and says they want to run Linux, you've got a whole series of options on the hardware side from IBM or will soon.

SH: Shipping today is iSeries, pSeries, zSeries, and xSeries.

iSeries was the last to ship with availability, and they did that in May. It's a pretty cool configuration too. There's a lot of interesting breadth about it because we did it for the mainframe, and we did it in logical partitions that let you run multiple images. So, not to miss a trick, the AS/400 group, which is now the iSeries, did the same thing. So, they launched it with logical partitions, meaning you can run multiple Linux partitions in the AS/400 environment and have both environments coexisting and have multiple solutions on them.

TD: Where do you see the whole IBM Linux vision going?

SH: This is all about positioning ourselves for where Linux is. It's the fastest growing server operating system in the world. We want to be relevant from a hardware, software, and services point of view, whether those services are from our partners or not. We're enabling the whole infrastructure. Linux has become, for us, not just another operating system, but a kind of a rallying point. It's a core piece.

There are three reasons that it goes beyond being an operating system. One, Linux, in itself, is cross platform. That's pretty attractive. It's not like most operating systems, which run on one of our platforms. Two, the fact that it's open source allows us to place the applications not just where Linux is, but also on other platforms. So, we've announced AIX 5.0. You can compile Linux applications on top of AIX. Three, we can take the best of technologies from our other operating systems and contribute them to the Linux movement to let Linux scale to the enterprise faster than any operating system in history. We are already on that track having gotten further in the nine years it's been around than in other operating systems. We will continue that. So, there are three movements where Linux has got its claws.