It's really not an issue-at least in the view of Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, a nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux. "In the end, if we are patient, they always will [contribute]. Nobody wants to maintain their own separate version of the Linux kernel," Zemlin says. "It always pays in the long run to contribute back. IBM is perhaps the best example of a company that understood this long ago and invested massive resources contributing code to Linux that both they and their competitors shared. What IBM got in return was a multi-billion-dollar operating system and a multi-tens-of-billion-dollar market opportunity. As more of industry utilizes Linux to create products and services, this will serve as a great example as to how to succeed with open source and Linux."

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