NW: Right now in the machine control and communictions area there is one world leader that dominates this whole space, and that's Siemens. They have 53% of the market share for all kinds of machine controls and machine networking.We have a monolithic situation here, much like in the Microsoft world. It would be really interesting to explore how they're dealing with the changes happening with Linux in their space. Are they completely ignoring it? Are they aware of it? Are they developing alternative strategies? It must be worrying them, occupying them. Two of the people involved in our project have worked with Siemens and will contact them early next week. The thing is to find out who is the right competent person to talk to. It would be very interesting for you to interview that person as well.
DS: There must be quite a few people working on this in Siemens. Linux is becoming the commodity operating system, much like TCP/IP became a commodity communications protocol. It's also familiar to countless engineers. That's why it ubiquitizes so quickly. So naturally many engineers inside Siemens must be adopting Linux — justl like they did at IBM.
NW: We also see Linux as much much more than another commodity operating system. Because it really allows the development of new applications. It's so flexible and easily understood by a large number of developers that we are in a situation where people can develop exciting applications and sell those rather than the operating system.
DS: And the Net becomes the platform.
NW: Yes.
DS: With many of those applications, what gets communicated and displayed are XML documents. So, in fact, a lot of that development will be around XML rather than deeper code. I think we're looking at Linux and the Net together becoming the platform for social computing, or manufacturing, or both, or any combination of many different kinds of work.
NW: With this project we want to outline a little of what we'd like to do with this project and invite people to help us see what we can do with it. And hopefully one or two ideas will catch fire. We will have a fairly high profile workshop where we will invite people from three areas