Today I had lunch at a house with a Silicon valley couple and its tot. I played with the kiddie's Tinkertoys, the first time I've ever played with Tinkertoys that I can remember. I wish I'd played more with such toys as a child. Maybe now I'd be more of an engineering type and I wouldn't have to worry as much about finding a job.

The father, an Oracle employee, asked me for some explanation of IBM's pro-Linux strategy, especially in view of direct competition between AIX and GNU/Linux. I explained it as follows: IBM understands that, in the end, the conflict is between Microsoft's closed standards and the rest of the world's open standards, and since IBM had to pick a side, it realized that it's best to ally with the player who won't eat you.

I'm not certain why I felt uneasy giving this explanation. It's just an obvious application of open-standards advocacy rhetoric to a real-world situation. I think perhaps I'm just not comfortable giving these opinions as my own when I didn't come up with them and yet I can't cite any one source where I got them.