But it reads as if he called the shot and piloted the turn. That is not my recollection or understanding. Other folks contributed as much or more to driving the Linux/open source pivot. Irving Wladawsky-Berger, the late Scott Handy, _et al_. It's IBM, so there were a ton of folks involved and contributing.
My source: I was an industry analyst and consultant in the server / system software space at the time, and I was in at least a few of the rooms where it happened.
They’re also wildly different architecturally from your typical rack of x86 servers, which is why the initial reaction to Linux running on a mainframe sounded stupid at first. When I worked at IBM in the 2010s, a Linux Zserver felt more like a VM running inside the mainframe than anything else. There were abstractions of the mainframe components that intentionally leaked into the Linux side that were interesting. I knew very little about traditional mainframe software development at the time, so I was very fascinated by how it all worked.
