VA Linux moving on infrastructure front White Papers Linux Like other high-tech firms, the company has fallen victim to a slowing economy, reporting in February a wider than expected loss for its second fiscal quarter. Following is an edited version of a question and answer session with Augustin after he gave a keynote speech at Comdex Chicago 2001. A lot of companies are looking at their spending costs to see how they can reduce spending. That propagates down into IT costs. Linux and open source, in general, provide an excellent way for companies to look at lowering those IT costs, and it is not just a matter of acquisition costs.
Free software is free.
In fact, that is part of it, but it is also in the total cost of ownership, in particular around the cost to integrate the software into their environment. We also see a lot of opportunity to improve productivity in the enterprise. One of the things I talked about today was a system we sell that's based on SourceForge, which is a collaborative development environment. We show that we can generate significant productivity improvements by simply creating an environment in which software developers inside a company can collaborate and share code. It's been pretty clear that those guys have fallen on hard times.