At the LinuxWorld conference in the US last week IBM said it has reconfigured its Lotus Foundations software to preload on Linux distributions like Red Hat, Ubuntu and Novell's Suse Linux. Do you expect this to result in more businesses switching to Linux?

I think what you're seeing there is people running on Linux and not knowing it. If you're a Lotus user what you really care about is getting to your Lotus application and not what is underneath. So here's a way for IBM to serve that customer constituency while at the same time taking advantage of all the advantages of Linux underneath: the reliance, performance, security and stability advantages. So I think that move is in some respects more about giving the system administrators in Lotus environments all the advantages of Linux and open source while giving their customer base the advantages of applications such as Lotus which is what they are looking for. It opens up a whole new wave of adoption.

How does CentOS's clone affect, for good or bad, Red Hat's Enterprise Linux market?

CentOS is not unlike Fedora; it's a Fedora knock-off. The whole idea with Fedora is that it's almost a pre-alpha, pre-beta of RHEL. We get the technology out there early, we get early adopters, lots of testing and lots of use cases on it etc. Often times people ask me "what is coming in the next RHEL?" and we say look in the current Fedora - that indicates what is coming in the next RHEL. So in terms of that it's a good thing, it gives us the huge, huge footprint community out there. With an operating system the different combinations and types of hardware that you cover is very hard to do, and we've got a lot of that testing shaken out before we even hit a beta on RHEL just because it has been running in Fedora and in many cases CentOS, so in that regard we think its very good. But from a commercial perspective there's more than just the bits - the bits are a small part of the distribution. Once you get into RHEL what you get is the RHEL ecosystem: we've got 4,500 certified ISVs, we've got 3,500 certified hardware platforms and we work with our customers to help them drive where RHEL is going to go. RHEL is not just bug fixing; we provide features within the lifespan of RHEL and we ensure when we put those features in that we maintain compatibility both for the applications above and the hardware below. Our customers help us drive what features they want to see in that lifecycle of RHEL and you can't get that with Fedora or with CentOS.