IBM wants to harness the power of this community, allowing members to work together in hardware, software and tuning, sharing the resulting breakthroughs. As with Linux IBM is looking to build service revenues here, in this case design and manufacturing service revenues.
I have said before that IBM is the leader in monetizing the open source model. But open source should not be confused with Linux. It's a business process, not an operating system, in which innovations are shared from a common pool, and costs are spread out among many different companies.
The short form. It's not communism, it's a co-op.
As hardware becomes software, and as Moore's Second Law bites, the open source business model is moving into the vacuum.
Dana Blankenhorn, "Could Apple loss be IBM's gain?" ZDNet Open Source Blog, 9 Jun 2005.
