Kurt Akeley, SGI cofounder--"More important than having the external world look at SGI the way we want to be perceived, the external world is starting to look at Linux and the Open Source production process the way we think they should be perceived."

Jeremy Allison, co-author of Samba and lead engineer of Samba, SGI--"The people in charge of the Linux management effort at SGI fully realize that they must not produce a splintered version of Linux. They understand that it must be a common kernel and that it must have all the common libraries; no one here wants to revive the UNIX wars."

Charles Marker, Director of Engineering, SGI--"The two goals I have for my team are to help make Linux a more enterprise class operating system and to help SGI become a valued member of the Open Source community."

SGI is taking a leadership position in bringing core technology into the Linux^® space. Its application will be found in Internet infrastructure, education, research, software development, manufacturing, entertainment, the sciences, and government.

This paper illuminates the SGI history and current position regarding Linux and Open Source. The means chosen to define and articulate that position are the works-in-progress at SGI and the voices of the professionals supporting those projects.

The Linux/Open Source milieu has been characterized as "that in which being differentiated is good, but being different is bad. You want red hair, but not three eyes."

We appreciate the colorfulness of that characterization, but Dave McAllister, a major SGI contributor to the SGI/Linux strategy, renders it in black and white absolutes. "SGI is committed to having Linux remain as Linux. Having it splinter into multiple Linuxes serves no purpose. Linux is Linux is Linux. There is no substantive difference between a Red Hat Linux, a Caldera Linux, a SuSE Linux, or a Mandrake product. If you build for Linux on IA-32, you can deliver it on any of those platforms."

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