Vendors and open source gurus hold Linux summit

Open source leaders and major IT vendors have converged on Ottawa in Canada to discuss the commercial opportunities of the Linux operating system (OS).

The first meeting of the Linux Advisory Council - the brainchild of Canadian software firm, Corel - saw leading figures from Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, Red Hat, and SuSE rub shoulders with Linux luminaries such as Eric Raymond.

Derik Belair, Linux product manager at Corel, said: "What we'd like to do is really bridge the gap between the Linux community and the Linux commercial community. The Linux community has always been well-structured, and we need to ensure that new community members are employing some of those same communication tactics."

Belair admitted that it can be difficult for vendors to deal with the open source community, as retail survival has always hinged on guarding commercial secrets. Publishing code on the Internet can be anathema to traditional IT vendors, he said.

Vendors also have more basic commercial concerns, according to Belair. "One of the main questions that commercial vendors have is: 'how can we make money from Linux?' There are ways for them to have profits, but those ways have changed greatly from the Windows environment," he said.

Belair said training and support offer the greatest opportunities to make money out of Linux, particularly in deploying the OS across corporates.