Max McLaren: In Australia there are two key elements really when you are comparing an open source infrastructure to a closed source environment: one is obviously the procurement costs, so you can drive down your costs because you can use commodity hardware as opposed to traditionally high proprietary Unix or other type of hardware. Then it's the ongoing management and ancillary stuff: we spoke to a customer yesterday using 12-15 percent of their IT budget just for anti-virus software, if you could take that out of the equation you can put that money to better use. And we generally find that when you look at some of our large corporate customers managing hundreds of our servers, they are generally doing that with just a couple of administrators whereas with other proprietary environments you normally times that by four or five.

What's happening with Alan Cox at the moment - does he still work for Red Hat?

Paul Cormier: Absolutely. Alan is going great, he is still one of the top contributors to the Linux kernel. Alan spends a lot of time at the hardware layer, but Alan typically goes off and looks for the hardest problems that are out there in the Kernel and works on that. We don't go to Alan and say "hey Alan we want you to implement this functionality and here's the schedule', rather Alan finds the hot spots on his own and solves them before most other people even realize them. Alan is very much with Red Hat and is a great resource, a great engineer and a great guy.

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