Asked about the notion of open-sourcing DB2 during the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit in San Francisco, Jim Wasko, director of the IBM Linux Technology Center, said such an issue was "a challenge for us at IBM." Afterward, he acknowledged directly that an open source avenue for DB2 was not planned.

Wasko said there was conflict within IBM depending on different product lines, such as his having a Linux bias and Windows representatives in IBM having a Windows bias. "It's a constant give and take," he noted. "Do we sacrifice some software revenue for services revenue?" In another instance, the issue may be about whether to sacrifice hardware revenue, he said, joking that "it depends on whose bonus it's based on."

"It's something [in which] we constantly evaluate what makes the most sense," Wasko said during a panel session about Linux and enterprise and cloud computing. Just prior to the DB2 query, Wasko was asked whether Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems and its open source projects, such as MySQL, had affected Linux usage with these products. "It's created some challenges for us," he responded. Elaborating on his response later, Wasko said Oracle has been trying to get customers to swap out IBM equipment for Oracle's own Exadata server and the Oracle database.

Earlier on Wednesday at the conference, Linux Executive Director Jim Zemlin cited the upcoming 20th anniversary of Linux, which occurs in August. "It's amazing to think but it's been 20 years since Linus Torvalds's original post announcing the Linux project," Zemlin said. The choice of the GNU General Public License for Linux and the freedom offered to use the software as users' pleased revolutionized the computing industry, he said.