Q&A, Part 1: IBM exec says Linux no longer just a Unix replacement

Computerworld - SAN FRANCISCO -- Steve Mills, senior vice president and group executive for IBM's software division, discussed Linux usage trends, the company's involvement in the development of Linux and open-source virtualization software, and plans for AIX during an interview with Computerworld here yesterday at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo.
Part 1 of the interview follows. Part 2 is also available online (see "Q&A Part 2: IBM exec sees open-source license glut").
To what degree are you starting to see fresh deployments of Linux, as opposed to customers who are merely switching from Unix to Linux? They're still doing what they were doing, but they're also now doing a lot of incremental new implementations. What has been building momentum in the marketplace for the last couple years has been actually new applications going in that are running on Linux. It's not easy to track what a lot of independent software vendors are doing. But there are many, many hundreds of applications out there today. These application providers are putting their code onto Linux because they want new sales.
The way you want to think about this is the way the evolution of Unix occurred. That was a very long process. The early days of Unix tended to be very simple applications, a lot of one-off things that people were cobbling together. There was a certain freedom of expression if you will associated with some of that early application activity on Unix, and then it began to come together around more of the classical application function that businesses need to run. As you go into companies of various kinds today, in the Wall Street world, you'll find all kinds of analysis and trading system activity that takes place on Unix systems. If you go into the telco environment, you find a lot of systems there associated with the whole front operation, a customer-facing environment, billing capture off the electronic switches and things of this nature -- production control, plant-floor systems, all kinds of mainstream uses of computing that are based upon Unix.

The Linux movement bears resemblance to this. If you go back to the very beginning, in the early '90s, you had a lot of the one-off things taking place off onto the side. The easiest thing to do was to take some existing work of a lightweight nature that wasn't going to stress Linux very much and move that over. Linux is less expensive. I can run it on a cheaper box. I can save some money. So it's targeted at