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GEELAN: They would be analogous. We're right at the starting point and what you see is a cycle.

FRICKE: Uniform basically evolved into - the suits started showing up in '87, '88. IBM made the announcements, you know, Apollo was making announcements.

GEELAN: It is analogous.

FRICKE: The same thing happened here. In 1999 we had IBM and people here were kind of putting their toes in the water. By '01 they were investing a billion dollars in Linux, and HP was investing large amounts of money in Linux in multiple dimensions that competed with and complemented what IBM did. And the Novells and the Red Hats and all these people, and it was a maturing business show in '01, '02 and '03.

GEELAN: What is the next phase? It sounds to me like you're almost saying, for example, in show terms, LinuxWorld just becomes a technology show, and what else? What about in technology terms? Open source becomes what? Will the standard - will the phrase get retired eventually?

FRICKE: Open source?

GEELAN: Yes.

FRICKE: Not in my career.

GEELAN: That's not going to happen?

FRICKE: Well, never say never.

GEELAN: Right. But in a sense, if it's no longer a contradistinction because that becomes the predominant paradigm...

FRICKE: Well, there are still a lot of proprietary environments out there and especially up the stack, that we're still - the current contesting battleground is in middleware and databases.

GEELAN: Right. But do you see that going up the stack over time?

FRICKE: Yes, it's going to go up the stack. Open source will not take over the entire world, but it's going to become more prevalent at each layer of the stack, with the biggest part of the pyramid being at the operating system and Web tools. But Solaris hasn't gone away, although they had to adopt; AIX, HP-UX haven't gone away. In fact AIX is growing to some extent. Windows is growing; it hasn't gone away. But Linux is growing the fastest, right, so it's establishing its place in the sun, pun intended.

GEELAN: Now you know why we have Pierre to do this. This is good stuff.

FRICKE: It's establishing its place in the sun as a mainstream operating environment that a set of people will consume to solve business problems in a way that gives them the flexibility to do so. There are other people who are using HP-UX and AIX and Windows and they will continue to do so. Mainframes have been dead for a long time but IBM still makes a lot of money on mainframes.

GEELAN: Everything is going to keep on going.

FRICKE: So stuff doesn't die. It may mature and it may become a cash cow or it may become just a stable market. Then there are growth paradigms and Linux is in its hockey stick growth - it's maturing. When something matures, at these kinds of conferences you don't have as much new news any more.

GEELAN: Yes, the fizz goes out, but that's not a bad thing.

FRICKE: What it means is people are doing real work now. We're off the height curve and we're under the what we're just starting to call the plateau of productivity. That's where we are with Linux. Where we're still trying to sort things out, where there's still the battle now, is in middleware. JBoss versus WebLogic and WebSphere, and [bias QL] versus the local UB.

GEELAN: Now put on your JBoss hat because people are absolutely interested in that. Where are we on that? Within the ecosystem JBoss is high energy; you have this fantastic reputation; you are driven; you're nice. I mean, all these things are kind of weird but it's all coming together. Where are you on the great battle against those Goliaths?

FRICKE: I think we're basically where Linux was a little while ago and coming up the pike maybe in '01-'02 kind of a timeframe. Linux was really starting to climb and start to really establish itself and we're establishing ourselves now. We have at present 37 percent of the enterprise surveyed, tied with WebSphere at 37, so we've caught up with penetration with WebSphere. We're neck and neck in terms of penetration of the enterprise.

We tend to be used for different things. WebSphere is really good for these intergalactic complex problems, and if you need a space shuttle that's the place to go. We're good at the mass market, high volume, solving mainstream problems that don't require a great deal of complexity. In fact that have a great deal of synergy and the developers have a great deal of synergy with our simplicity message. You know, our developers get rewarded for developing things that are simple. At IBM you tend to get rewarded for developing things that are complex and solve complex problems, and we get rewarded and recognized in the industry for solving things in a simple way, solving problems in a simple way.

WebSphere is not going to go away, right, and BEA is not going to go away unless they get bought or something, but those things are going to live on. We're capturing a lot of the growth now.

GEELAN: Let's call a spade a spade. You all at JBoss must be anticipating one day sitting on 65% of the market. Then, do all the same things that have blighted the other players when they got a predominant market share, are they going to apply? Are we going to see a sullying of the JBoss purity because...

FRICKE: Bill Gates wrestled with this problem, and he's been focused on making sure he doesn't become the next IBM of the '80s. He knows what he did to IBM and he doesn't want to become that. Even now he pretends to be focused on that. I think Marc Fleury is very similar to Bill Gates in that respect. He's not going to let us become WebSphere and, by the way, there's another dimension to this that Microsoft doesn't have - our community will not let us become that.

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