AlwaysOn: What do you think about the whole Linux movement?

Khosla: I’m a big fan of Linux. If one distribution, like the Red Hat distribution, becomes the de facto distribution, you might actually end up with a closed system. Even though it’s ‘open,’ if everybody starts writing to Red Hat, which is sort of happening, then there’s a real danger that you won’t see innovation and they’ll start charging, which they’ve already done. And [then] Linux no longer matters.

UNIX was open until it became Solaris, and then really there were one or two important versions of Solaris and UNIX itself became less important — other than that the name Solaris was derived from UNIX. But nobody cared about UNIX, there wasn’t an open UNIX [anymore]. I think there’s some danger there won’t be an open Linux — that’s a pretty important issue that I don’t see discussed much. I think that’s a pretty real threat.

[AlwaysOn]