When Oracle first came out and said that they were going to support RHEL, they couldn't. It was not unlike CentOS; they took the bits and recompiled them into Oracle Linux but they didn't bring the ecosystem across with it - you can only get that from RHEL. So we think the combination of the bits, the ecosystem, the lifecycle management and the stability, that combination that makes up the ecosystem is what customers are buying, not just the bits. We feel very comfortable with that model, so for the most part CentOS is a good thing. I'd rather see people running CentOS than Windows.

An Australian open source lawyer told Computerworld that existing enterprises have spent 20 years under a closed model and the idiosyncrasies of its licensing have become embedded in IT practices and expectations. How creative do enterprises need to be in ensuring their open source strategy delivers the right legal and licensing requirements, cost savings and ultimately business benefits?

Max McLaren, MD for Red Hat ANZ: One of the cool things Red Hat did when they released under an open source subscription was take care of the legal impacts that corporate Australia or America would be concerned about. Red Hat has something called the software assurance policy that generally caters for most things that corporates talk to me about when they have a concern. The first question they have is; "is there someone to call?" and the second question is "is someone going to protect me if I'm being sued by using something that I shouldn't be using?" Red Hat does both of those things with the open source assurance policy. What we've done recently with the copyright case against us was we settled that and did it on behalf of the whole of the open source industry as opposed to just Red Hat. These are the sorts of things Red Hat does in terms of trying to put forward an industry stand point and to satisfy some of the concerns out there.

Paul Cormier: The other thing is we are a member of the Open Invention Network, which is a consortium of us, IBM and some others. We've all thrown in some very large dollars and patents into this consortium as a sort of collaboration and agreement with each other, so that should anything come to bear with patent problems within open source the force of this entire consortium would be behind it. The OIN patent portfolio right now is getting very strong. What do you make of Microsoft's recent moves towards interoperability, their open specification promise, and recent public donations to Apache and the Open Source Census?