Ransom Love’s addition to Progeny’s board of directors was announced last week, covered in eWEEK, InfoWorld (and numerous other places) via IDG News Service, CNET News.com, NewsForge, LinuxPlanet, and ServerWatch.

My favorite bit was from Robin Miller’s NewsForge piece:

The idea of getting Linux into the hands of thousands of loyal resellers all over the world was a large part of the reason Ransom engineered Caldera’s purchase of SCO, a move that sadly backfired in a way he certainly didn’t anticipate, namely endless (although often laughable) legal actions seemingly against anyone who has ever touched a computer running Linux or used a piece of software licensed under the GPL.

But that was then, and lessons have been learned. Progeny stuttered until Ian and his crew stopped development of Progeny Linux in late 2001 and concentrated on Linux consulting and customization. Ransom has also taken knocks, and plenty of them, both from free software supporters for being too commercial in his approach to Linux and from Caldera (later SCO) stockholders for not commercializing it enough — or at least not fast enough.

So here they are: One of the fathers of free/free Debian Linux being advised by one of the fathers of commercialized Linux, both with the Linux advocate’s gleam in their eyes, both older and and wiser than when they first started trying to earn a living dealing with this Linux thing, both finally getting vindicated as Linux starts to become a mainstream, almost ho-hum operating system used by the world’s largest financial organizations to process stock market transactions, not just by artists creating animated dwarves.

Welcome aboard, and welcome back, Ransom.