an extension of AIX to support high-end hardware. AIX 5 has the best of

Monterey. Linux cannot fill that need today, but over time we believe it

will. To help out we're making contributions to the open source movement

like the journal filesystem. We can't tell our customer to wait for Linux

to grow up. They need solutions today.

So if Linux grows up, will you abandon Monterey?

You're speculating that if all were equal, I'd rather be on one OS

than the other. There are always customers that have written software for

AIX API's and might want to use the capabilities of Monterey. We're trying

to make they co-exist. We're trying to allow customers to write to Linux

API's that run on top of a Monterey based OS.

What about the other way round? AIX apps running on Linux?

Yeah. If Linux had all of the capability of AIX, where we could put

the AIX code at runtime on top of Linux, then we would.

Are you doing anything?

Right now the Linux kernel does not support all the capabilities of

AIX. We've been working on AIX for 20 years. Linux is still young. We're

helping Linux kernel up to that level. We understand where the kernel is

is. We have a lot of people working now as part of the kernel team. At the

end of the day, the customer makes the choice, whether we write for AIX or

for Linux.

Will AIX be open source?

We're willing to open source any part of AIX that the Linux community

considers valuable. We have open-sourced the journal filesystem, print

driver for the Omniprint. AIX is 1.5 million lines of code. If we dump

that on the open source community then are people going to understand it?

You're better off taking bits and pieces and the expertise that we bring

along with it. We have made a conscious decision to keep

contributing. There are some things that the Linux community can do

better. Linus is worried that there is too much code in the kernel and

it's taking longer and longer to get a new release out. So, we could open

source AIX but it is just not practical.