An interview with IBM's Vice President of Open Source and Standards about their Open Source Strategy, the recent pledge of its patents for more than 150 open software standards, his take on the ODF vs. XML issue, and much more in The LXer Interview of Bob Sutor.

Open-source software may not make major inroads into industry-specific enterprise applications, according to an IBM open-source guru. The next 10 years will be "do or die" for this type of application, said Bob Sutor, vice president of open source and standards at IBM, in a LinuxWorld keynote address Wednesday.

With LinuxWorld showcasing the popularity of the open source operating system, and with open source in general finding its legs in the enterprise, Bob Sutor, IBM's vice president of open source and standards, made a slate of predictions for Linux and open source during his keynote address on Wednesday at the Black Hat conference.

IBM has just announced a new corporate policy regarding its "behavior when helping to create open technical standards".

This week the Dutch government will discuss a proposal to switch as much as possible to open standards and open source software. The Microsoft director for the Netherlands, Theo Rinsema, responded that Microsoft is not objecting to open standards, but the proposal excludes too many not open standards, like PDF, MP3 and GSM, which are widely accepted standards.

During the LinuxWorld Expo in San Francisco, I met with Bob Sutor, IBM's vice president of open source and standards. We discussed document standards and the implications of ISO's controversial decision to grant fast-track approval to Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) format.

Determining a move toward open source and open standards needs to become a lot less emotional. And to get there companies need to cook up a policy for evaluating a move to open standards and open source.

Industry standards may not be open (e.g., Microsoft Word file formats) so there are reverse-engineering risks with any OSS dependent upon those standards. The MoJ preference for open standards (e.g., Open Document Format, which is now supported even by Microsoft) lessens this risk.

Open source software and open standards were high on the agenda at the opening of the GovTech 2008 conference in Durban this morning.