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IBM banks on Linux
jdaily writes "IBM's server group head said in an interview that
IBM will Linux-enable all of its server
hardware, from PCs to mainframes. " This is a pretty major endorsement... but I still want a Thinkpad running Linux with every component (including the freakin' modem!) working. You listening IBM?
Look at http://www.linmodems.org/ and http://www.suse.cz/development/ltmodem. Hardware drivers are 90% ready. We need someone to write v.34, linmodem project is not moving too far. Pavel Machek -- pavel@suse.cz
I think most big IBM customers don't like doing really rapid changes in systems (eg. dropping SNA and scrambling to get a TCP/IP version of their system in place). I think it would be a good thing for IBM's customers if they would open up SNA, perhaps offer source for an SNA driver for the Linux kernel. That would allow for bridges between SNA and TCP/IP systems, and would give a nice migration path for people who want to move away from SNA in a slow, well planned fashion, as well as better functionality for people who are fine with SNA and want to stay there.
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Open mind, insert foot.
Expect to see price hikes in other IBM Operating Systems as these get smaller market shares. Who knows, they might even Open Source some of the marginal Operating Systems, like OS/2.
Unless I'm mistaken, IBM can't Open Source OS/2 because Microsoft still have a firm claim on much of the code. A lot of folks have been trying to get them to release the WPS code, but for all I know, it's subject to the same problems as the OS.
What will be interesting to watch is how IBM treat AIX during the next year. If they begin porting all the enterprise goodies to Linux, I expect we'll see the other UNIXs climbing over each other to get their stuff ported. This could be enough to convince Sun to come clean and get serious about Open Source.
Wouldn't you like to be a fly on the wall in Microsoft's board room today?
slashdot broke my sig
Thing is -- there's a number of websites out there which started off on an old notebook. The idea of what is and isn't a server is really doing a headspin right now. My last consulting gig relied on a "server" that would be eclipsed by most of last year's notebooks -- a dual 90MHz HPUX box with 256MB RAM and about 8GB storage. This was a statistical analysis server for about a half-dozen statisticians and programmers at a major pharmaceutical company (granted, it was a gimpy old box the department had been saddled with).
And from all I've seen, Thinkpads make really spiffy Linux boxen, if you're willing to accept a few warts. It would be very cool if those warts could be removed.
And yes, I agree that the issue is more one of IBM being a large number of fairly autonomous divisions. Still, a unified vision in this one area would be most sweet.
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
Jeff Papows resigned from head of the Lotus division in December. His behaviour was so strongly pro-Microsoft that conspiracy theorists thought he must be in their pay. Now he's left, we might actually get somewhere.
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Xenu loves you!
IBM just contributed patches to the kernel to run on the S/390 hardware. That counts for something, doesn't it?
See what they've done before berating them saying they're "just going to make a quick buck".
Just remember - as far as the Dinosaur Folks are concerned, they've been around forever and it's up to us *IX types to work with them. Not the other way around. In that light, it's absolutely fascinating that the Dinosaur Maker itself has put such a wide-spread stamp of approval over Linux...
Some of the big IBM decision makers were techies back in the early days of mainframes. My boss was recently telling me how in the early days, the source code to mainframe operating systems was freely given to customers, and customers would frequently provide a fix along with any bug reports. Then gradually, it became de-rigeur to keep your source code in a locked box.
In light of that, you can see how Open Source just might click with that generation.
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Admittedly, most of the programming world is far more familiar with TCP/IP. But this is not an argument for getting rid of SNA. SNA was developed and optimized for the mainframe architecture, and there is no doubt that it does what it needs to do extremely well.
The argument for knocking off of SNA would be if TCP/IP is shown to have superior performance characteristics than SNA - something which is not the case. The protocol is indeed proprietary (which is bad), but it is not screwed up. You seemed to have made that statement solely because you, personally, are unfamiliar with SNA.
And as another poster has pointed out, TCP/IP on IBM mainframes does exist, and has existed for quite some time.
There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.
My IBM Thinkpad 380Z Works fine running Mandrake Linux 6.0 and Caldera OpenLinux. I've got an Viking 56k PCMCIA Modem and an Linksys 10/100 Ethernet card in it, and both of those work great too. The only thing that doesn't work on mine is the 16 bit sound. The 8 bit sound works fine. The only thing I had a problem with because of that was playing all my MP3s.
Bravo! Someone moderate this up to its full 5. =)
Three Step Plan:
1. Take over the world.
2. Get a lot of cookies.
3. Eat the cookies.
IP QoS and more particularly CoS (class of service, most standard version being DiffServ) is coming - it's just requires policy-based management tools to make it much easier to set up.
SNA over (say) the DLSW protocol over IP with CoS is quite a good combination - you give low latency to the important traffic, particularly the network control stuff, using DiffServ priorities (using the TOS byte in the IP header).
However, most IP CoS products don't let you prioritise between different SNA traffic - e.g. printing and transactions get the same priority - so it's not quite there yet, though Cisco routers at least do let you do this.
Yes, OS/400 has TCP/IP; and it's still buggy, and about two years ago they finally got it to handle 27 whole Mbps over Fast Ethernet.
Their TCP/IP service daemons often suffer from brainlock, in far greater frequency than any decent Unix including Linux.
People don't rewrite their legacy apps to use TCP/IP because SNA is more reliable on OS/400.
I can't speak to OS/390.
But what are they going to do to develop linux?
The list is long. Very long. Do you know about Jikes, for starters? how about Linux on the 390? It goes on and on.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
This isn't IBMs problem. Customers still demand SNA. In fact, it's considered a huge change in the mainframe industry that versions of MVS that don't have TCP/IP are considered obsolete and unsupported by IBM.
SNA also has a few advantages over TCP/IP.
With TCP/IP, you have to overprovision your network by a fairly large margin in order to handle peak loads. The way SNA works, those peaks don't happen, and so you don't have to overprovision as heavily.
Also, for similar reasons, response times are more predictable with SNA than TCP/IP, so it's more suited to certain kinds of real-time response applications, such as airline ticket sales. :-)
Not that I'm a big booster for SNA. It's a stupidly designed protocol that deserves a quick death, but it isn't going to happen anytime soon.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
OS/390 aka MVS has had a full POSIX personality for ..err. another long time (don't know how long). This was specifically put in to enable "ease of migration". When you see an Apache Web Server running on S/390, it's using the POSIX environment. You'll note that all of IBM's middleware (the DB2 and MQSeries-es of this world) have also been TCP/IP enabled since Pontious was a Pilot.
So from a "killer app" for migration SNA -> IP, all the components have been in place for a number of years. That there hasn't been a mass exodus from SNA-based applications indicates to me that one or more of the following conditions therefore apply:
With regards to "skills gap", I'll probably cause a flame war here by calling you an upstart UNIX weenie here.. Remember that S/390 has been "out in the wild" running large-scale commercial installations for 30 odd years. There's a *lot* of skilled people out there who can do COBOL, who can administer IBM mainframes, and who get paid good money for putting in and maintaining SNA networks.
Just remember - as far as the Dinosaur Folks are concerned, they've been around forever and it's up to us *IX types to work with them. Not the other way around. In that light, it's absolutely fascinating that the Dinosaur Maker itself has put such a wide-spread stamp of approval over Linux...
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I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy
Ah, OK I think I mis-understood where you were coming from then. I apologise.
Supplementary question for you though: You're big on moving to IP to fix networking problems. Is this because:
A) TCP/IP is inherently more stable, scalable and better at traffic management than SNA(*)
B) TCP/IP networks are "cooler", and much more importantly more widespread, than SNA networks and therefore the thrust of both market place development AND corporate IT strategy is heavily favoured towards IP instead of SNA?
Obviously the implications are the same in either case - move to IP - but I am genuinely interested in getting an answer to this question from someone who really understands both sides.
(*) = My understanding based on what I've heard is that SNA is much better at traffic control and prioritisation than vanilla TCP/IP.
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I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy
Well, I can't be authoratitive on this, but I know that at some point in recent history, Lotus' own strategy was that the Notes client would disappear to be replaced with a Web interface to all Notes functions. Indeed, you CAN get your email, and browse databases etc, across the web - if the server is enabled for such. You can also get POP3 access to your mail if enabled. You may want to check with whoever runs your servers to see if that's enabled.
Mind you, then Lotus spoilt it all by saying "Web access everywhere. But, er.. Well, we'll do a Windows client for Notes 5". Since that covers probably 99% of the target client audience, y'all out there running "non standard platforms" on internal systems with the web access goodies turned off are all a bit stuck...
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I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy
D) is true, except for the fact that the 3rd party SNA stack my Windows stinkpad is currently running is from... IBM. Developers, maintainers and specifiers of the SNA protocol. And, incidently, developers & maintainers of the SNA stack on the S/390 systems to which I'm talking.
So, yes it's 3rd party with respect to the O/S manufacturer, but then SNA is a 3rd party protocol to my O/S manufacturer. And I've already seen how good they are at implementing other not-invented-here protocol stacks. Like TCP/IP.....
Aside from the above commentry, your implied conclusion - SNA stacks on desktop machines aren't stress-tested - is irrelevant to their intended function. If it connects to a Mainframe, it's performing probably 100% of it's intended function(*). If it does so reliably, under variable simulated or tested networking conditions, then it is Fit For the Purpose It Was Bought For. Comparisons to the tests vis-a-vis IP stacks and relative number of users don't factor in.
(*) = unless you're running one of IBM's early-to-mid '90s desktop-OS APPC applications like NVDM/2 or DB2/2 that is. In which case, getting a 3270 connection to the S/390 is just the *start* of your trouble, and it's time to now start editing, then compiling, then activating, then testing innumerable options in a text APPC configuration file, begging your SNA networking guys for the appropriate magic numbers, and generally cursing your miserable existance on the planet. Not that I have personal experience of this of course.....
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I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy
D) A TCP/IP stack on a client desktop machine is generally a more mature solution than a SNA stack on a client desktop machine.
If you're connecting to a machine from a Windows box via SNA, you're using some kind of 3rd party stack. It gets used, primarily, to connect to mainframes. And not much else. So it doesn't get tested much, at least not on the same scale as TCP/IP gets tested every day.
These announcements are generally meaningless.
they mean a lot to Wall Street, which I would say is the sum total cause for this "announcement" (action to be done at a later date)
+&x
Fisrt, I'll set the stage by saying you won't find a bigger IP bigot than I am - I've been doing IP/Internet stuff daily since 1985, did the IP migration for a major oil company, and have been an Internet consultant. (Maybe more appropriately I should say I'm a bigot for the whole inet/Unix philosophy of keeping things simple by pushing the intelligence of the net to the periphery.)
That said, I developed a deep respect for the mainframe guys along about 1992, when we were hacking the mainframes into the IP intranet. (And anyone that's ever worked with an IBM 3172 protocol processor (because IP protocol processing is death to a batch-tuned machine) knows what a hack it was, especially early on.)
Although their methods and thought processes are quite different from the Internet "norm" (wow, I'm mainstream now - dangerous!), they came up with very good, very valid engineering solutions to the problems they faced at the time. SNA networking is a royal pain, and I avoid it where ever I can (which is pretty much everywhere by now). You try building a network which must be bank and hospital reliable, and connect thousands of users all over the country, often with only 9.6 kbps lines to serve an entire site!
SNA is elegant in its own twisted way, and as a network guy, I can certainly appreciate why it worked well then, and why it may well be with us for quite some time. Granted it's a pain to work with, but IBM and the other mainframe folks have very good IP support today, so it's really a non-issue. What difference does it make to you if the back-end network between the mainframes and their storage/output devices is SNA? It's (fairly ) simple, incredibly robust, and dictatorially controllable - even the IP bigot I am, I have to confess I envy the SNA guys' ability to manage and control traffic with fine-grained and even adaptable policy.
The moral is this: Don't be too quick to shoot down competing technologies until you learn a bit more about why they're there. (I say this because I could have been reading my own rant about SNA circa 1991 in one of the earlier posts...) We can learn a lot from the mainframe guys, and vice versa - and that's what makes what's happening now so much fun...
(Disclaimer: I work for Tivoli, an IBM company which does all kinds of cool systems and network management stuff for pretty much everything. We get free beer on Fridays, too... it's not your daddy's IBM.)
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
It seems from the article, that Mr. Gerstner thinks Linux is a Java, and that programs that run on Linux can run on all Linux's everywhere. Which of course is false.
OK, that is what it looks like from a first glance view of the article, but I know better. IBM is trying to go back to their old philosophy of selling hardware. Let someone else do the software. IBM is putting all the money in so that it will take off. This is a good strategy, since it could take the dominant force away from their foe "MS". As well they look like the heroes, and their old reputation will finally be gone. Thus, they can claim it back again!
I'm worried about VA Linux. Don't get fooled by the stock price, they can be crushed by IBM. RedHat probably has nothing to worry about this, infact, they may make out more by this.
Don't get me wrong, I think this is a Good Thing(TM). Maybe now I won't have such trouble compiling GTK on AIX!
Steven Rostedt
Steven Rostedt
-- Nevermind
Does this mean I might be able to resurrect my CISC AS/400 model 9404? Even though it's obsolete, IBM still wants thousands of dollars for the O/S for this beast.
There are tons of old CISC AS/400's out there that could be put to good use if there was something other than OS/400 (for the price) to run on it. Since the "Linux on AS/400" project seems to be going nowhere, this might be my only hope.
Even if it never runs again, my 9404 makes a K-Rad night stand.
~Any apparent grammatical or typographic errors are caused by defects in your display device.
Why would anyone want to support their legacy :)
/. posters.
:)
apps when they could throw away millions of dollars to run Linux and be kewl?
I think your point about legacy support is a little over the heads of many
Since this will be moderated down to flamebait, perhaps I should mention hot grits and Natalie Portman
Do anal-retentive people hyphenate 'anal retentive'?
This is really out of IBM's hands, If they dropped SNA their current clients would revolt. In some Enterprise environments the legacy equipment, ie green screens, printers, which work perfectly fine for the application needed, will only use SNA. Anyone ever hear of a dumb term with an ip address? SNA is a logical, efficient protocol that coexists rather nicely with TCP/IP. DLSW is a prime example of the best of both worlds. SNA has made my brain sweat on more than one occasion but no more than any other protocol. In fact I think IPX takes the brain fart award and would much rather see it go away. At least SNA makes sense.
If you look at IBM's product lines, their agenda is fairly evident. WebSphere for example.
They have three levels Base, Advanced and Enterprise.
Base = Apache + a few bells and whistles. (Linux, Sun, AIX and NT)
Advanced = Base + EJB + Java ORB + DB bells and whistles (no Linux alone)
Enterprise = Advanced + CB (again no Linux alone).
They want to keep the fingers on all the pies (nothing wrong with that). But if you need to scale, you need AIX - for which you pay an arm and a leg - of course you get corporate support and the developer base from Linux/Unix.
This is the same strategy IBM would adopt across all product lines. If you see a product from IBM that has "universal feature availability" on all platforms (DB2 for eg - go on correct me) then they either have too much competition in that area or it doesnt have a value a proposition for AIX.
Just look at their Java 1.2 release strategy
Linux version in 2nd qt. '00
NT version 1st qt. '00
Aix version last qt. '99
Bottom line AIX and OS/390 are excellent revenue streams. They will never hurt them.
-- The best of my sons ? oh the one setting alight the roof top.
BBC News also has the story.
PigPog.
I'm curious what they will port to Linux from their other platforms. Even if they keep their latest stuff proprietary, IBM has quite a few older tools that have been pretty good. Regardless of whether you love or hate the interfaces, protocols and data formats, they have tended to be very robust. It would be nice to see some of the older ones appear as open source. For example, while I love CVS, I could imagine a couple of the features of CMVC being added to it.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
I'd forgotten this. Yep, don't expect an OSS OS/2 soon. At least not until Microsoft starts releasing Open Source.
I doubt if there's anything in this that raises many eyebrows in Redmond.
IBM has, months ago, heavily committed to Linux in the areas that compete most directly with MS offerings. This is about commitment to Linux in the rest of the IBM line.
IBM also made quite a splashy commitment to Windows 2000 last year.
I think this is more about IBM deemphasizing their own OS line vs. taking up Linux against MS.
IBM may be banking on a shakeout that leaves only Linux and MS standing. If such a shakeout occurs, it's the various UNIX and other OS vendors that'll need to scramble.
-Jordan Henderson
"With regards to "skills gap", I'll probably cause a flame war here by calling you an upstart UNIX weenie here.. Remember that S/390 has been "out in the wild" running large-scale commercial installations for 30 odd years. There's a *lot* of skilled people out there who can do COBOL, who can administer IBM mainframes, and who get paid good money for putting in and maintaining SNA networks."
... I do, however, see networking environments that support SNA as their method of connecting to said mainframes. I don't much care if the apps are still running strong, as the networks that support those connections are falling apart under the stress of corporate LAN requirements. If something provides me some shred of hope that people will upgrade/migrate, and move to an IP based network, I cheer it's arrival.
No flame war there, as I don't claim to do any sort of programming or operation of IBM mainframes
good. fast. cheap. (pick any two, you can't have all three)
No apology necessary ... I'm pretty thick skinned. As to the supplementary question (and this comes with some caveats):
... and said interoperability is clunky, a pain in the ass, and generally slow and suboptimal.
...) and QoS/CoS can do a very good job of providing predictable response times, guaranteed bandwith, etc.
My answer is C) TCP/IP WITH the addition of QoS/CoS across the backbone allows for a more effecient backbone design, and removes the need for multiprotocol networks which support both IBM protocols (SNA, APPN, all that junk) and native IP. The primary reason we would want this is B) that IP networks are more widespread, and increasingly required to interoperate with traditional SNA networks
* SNA is much better at traffic control than TCP/IP without quality of service. However, the need for that level of control should have been erased when the rest of the world migrated to switched Fast Ethernet (god only knows when that became available to FEPs
good. fast. cheap. (pick any two, you can't have all three)
The reliability to which you refer is the main reason large companies went with SNA in the first place. Happily, I have seen results that are at least as good using IP QoS/CoS to provide consistent response time and bandwidth.
... I attribute this mostly to old mainframe operators who refuse to learn a new technology and maintain a 30-year old death grip on the server/network environment.
The QoS/CoS capability (at least on a Cisco platform) is the driving force for Voice over IP and Voice over Frame Relay that many businesses are rolling out. If I can engineer a network that will provide predictable bandwidth and latency that is good enough for a human ear (less than 200ms latency, 13kbps dedicated bw per call), then there should be no issue providing consistent response time to a TN3270.
I have to agree, though, that it probably won't go anywhere soon. The tools have been in place for a long time to phase out SNA, and it hasn't happened
good. fast. cheap. (pick any two, you can't have all three)
I wouldn't necessarily call DLSw (or even DLSw+) the best of both worlds ... yeah, it provides some interoperability, but not with fast or well.
good. fast. cheap. (pick any two, you can't have all three)
Gak! typo. Read "not fast or well."
good. fast. cheap. (pick any two, you can't have all three)
You are entirely correct that there is TCP/IP support. I believe an open, LINUX OS on the mainframe would make software portability easier, and would make the argument to migrate both the software and protocol stack to a pure IP environment much more palatable from a business perspective.
... smooth interoperability with other 'nix servers, less of a skillset gap between admins, a single network architecture, no more "split networks" which are designed to deal with SNA and IP traffic separately, etc.
What I am looking for here is the "killer app" that would cause a migration, and LINUX as the OS could do that
good. fast. cheap. (pick any two, you can't have all three)
The other day I was visiting a fellow contractor in another part of the building and noticed he was running E and Gnome on a big screen. I asked him if it was Linux and he told me it was AIX. Apparently he'd managed to get it all to compile. The latest AIX seems to have the X11R6 support necessary to compile those neat Linux tools.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
IBM's got a few choices for support offerings. They could go with their IGS if they can scare up enough Linux talent. I think it's more likely that they'll outsource the whole job to Linuxcare or Redhat or one of the other Linux support companies. Those companies are in a much better position to give good Linux support, and IBM's not stupid.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
"The new wave is not value-added; it's garbage-subtracted" - Esther Dyson, Dec 1994
The Internet and electronic commerce are two of today's most important technologies. Using information technology to connect the entire enterprise has become a reality in corporations around the world, with dramatic improvements in company-wide efficiency, profitability,and accountability coming as a direct result. Today, IBM's Web site has more than 270,000 pages offering 14,000 products, is localized in 70 countries and 16 languages, and receives 7.8 million page visits per week worldwide. When IBM launched the redesign in February 1999, traffic shot up by 120 percent, and sales increased by 400 percent. IBM projects that e-commerce revenue will swell to $10-15 billion in 1999. IBM expects to procure $12 billion in goods and services over the Web, saving $240 million by replacing five million paper invoices. By supporting millions of self-service Internet transactions,IBM also anticipates saving approximately $600 million in 1999 in call center and field specialist support costs. When used to its full potential, the Internet offers businesses new opportunities to increase revenue and gain a lasting competitive advantage. VA Linux (Nasdaq:LINUX)on Dec 9, launched its $132 million IPO, pricing 4.4 million shares at $30 each. By the end of the day,those shares were worth $239 each. The company's stock gained 700 % in its first day of trading and VA Linux had achieved a market capitalization of $9.5 billion. VA Linux in Sunnyvale, Calif., manufactures machines based on processors from Intel Corp. that runs the Linux operating system. An alternative to to Microsoft's Windows NT. Jimmy Castro Member Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce Austin Texas JimmyCastro@Hotmail.com
To be honest, nothing at IBM involves Linux. Everything IBM has done with Linux has been essentially an external posturing and hype
Let's see what I can rattle off.
- DB/2 for Linux.
- MQSeries and ADSM clients for Linux
- 24x7 support for Linux on Netfinity Servers through the IBM Helpcenters
- GPL'd device driver for out ServeRAID PCI RAID Adapters (and onboard versions on Netfinitys)
- Domino Server
- A fast JDK for Linux
- Jikes Java debugger
- Code released to get it to run on an S/390
- Websphere for Linux
- VisualAge for Java now runs on Linux
- IBM HTTP Server for Linux (part of Websphere)
I could probably go on if I tried. Nothing at IBM involves Linux?As to Lotus Notes...sadly (or blissfully, depending on your opinion of the product), I don't see a Notes client happening. And while we don't do this at IBM, there is nothing stopping a customer from enabling browser- and SMTP-access to Notes databases (including mail).
Gerstner's even gone so far as to put one of his golden boys, Irving Wladawsky-Berger, on Linux (NYTimes story here, requires free login). Wladawsky-Berger has been credited with a lot of what got our Internet business going. For Gerstner to move him to Linux work is, IMO, a big deal.
I am running Linux-Mandrake 6.1 on my ThinkPad 600. It is just that there is no usable sound. I bought a Thinkpad without the DSP based proprietary modem that all the other thinkpads are crippled with.
APM - forget it. - No wait, you can get APM working but you have to leap tall buildings with a single bound to do it.
I have not tried the iRDA or USB ports (is there a usb port on it?).
Hot swap floppy? Anyone? Anyone? I did not have any success with that. I have been running Linux on notebooks since '95 and am used to jumping through hoops to do it (debian with floppies on a gateway nomad amd 486!).
When I do get sound working the signal level is remarkably anemic. And no, Booting Linux from DOS to get the sound driver loaded is just not an option.
Adults are obsolete children. - Dr. Seuss
Virtually everything works on the new thinkpads already....... There is a Lucent WinModem driver now (which was deemed not important enough for a slashdot story when I submitted it), there is a sound driver for the new i series, the video works (although the accelerated driver is still under development and the developers at XF86 have been ignoring my emails). The DVD is usable but movies don't play in linux and that's no fault of IBM's. In any case, IBM is being VERY helpful in getting Linux up and running on Thinkpads. Mine runs great!
Cheers...
Ummm.... OS/390 and OS/400 have had TCP/IP for a *long* time.... I was using a VM system in 1993 that had IP.
Perhaps you mean "why can't people re-write their legacy apps to use TCP/IP instead of SNA?". Which expands the scope of your complaint to encompass more than just IBM I think...
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I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy
IBM has claimed to support Linux on their laptops for some time now. And, they've supported Linux on the PC Servers for a awhile also.
This announcement is about Linux EVERYWHERE, going UP their product line. We've heard about Linux on the Mainframes. Now, I guess this means AS/400s will get it too. And, it's a firm commitment on IBM's part to support it on RS/6000 machines.
I think IBM believes this will return their economics back to the mid 60's, when they dominated the market and gave away their Operating Systems when you purchased their hardware. The problem with that was that the DOJ found it to be anti-competitive and forced them to start selling the OS's unbundled from the hardware at "competitive" prices.
Nobody since then, with the exception of MS, has ever made much money selling Operating Systems. It's capital intensive and your market for new releases can dry up really fast.
I'm sure IBM realizes that they can't hope to make money in Operating Systems the MS way, so... IBM is deemphasizing the Operating System as a profit center. Let others (MS and the Free Software Community) deal with the headaches. IBM will still invest heavily in making sure the dominant OSs run well on their hardware, but they can greatly simplify their lives by letting others develop the "commodity" Operating Systems.
I think IBM also believes that their services business will pick up in supporting end users and Enterprises on Linux. IBM is quietly but aggressively pushing into Linux services. This services business is very lucrative.
Expect to see price hikes in other IBM Operating Systems as these get smaller market shares. Who knows, they might even Open Source some of the marginal Operating Systems, like OS/2.
-Jordan Henderson
If they are serious about the mainframe part, and about open standards, maybe it will be a good excuse to migrate all of those poor bastard banks, retail chains, and airline reservation systems that still run on (shudder) SNA. Everyone else runs TCP/IP ... why not IBM mainframes?
Imagine a world where us poor network engineers don't have to cope with screwed-up proprietary IBM network protocols in the data center. (starry-eyed sigh)
good. fast. cheap. (pick any two, you can't have all three)
The key to manipulating marketing people for your own evil goals is to drop a few buzzwords, "You know, more of our customers could use this driver if it were Open Source!" (Something you tried to slide by your manager and got shot down for) and marketing goes "Ooo! Open Source" in that typical Dilbert marketing tone. The other marketing people take up the battle cry and the next thing your manager knows, his second line is asking him why the driver isn't open source. Your manager then comes to you (having completely forgotten shooting you down the first time) and asks you (in that same irritable management tone as if it's your fault) why the driver isn't open source. You are ready for this question and say "Well I've been considering that and there's no real reason it couldn't be..." and Vola! Open source product.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I work at IBM. Everyone outside of IBM tells me, "It must be great working at IBM with all the Linux stuff they do." To be honest, nothing at IBM involves Linux. Everything IBM has done with Linux has been essentially an external posturing and hype. Otherwise you would see Notes for Linux, Lotus Smartsuite for Linux, and Linux would run properly on RS6000 machines with Token Ring.
IBM might want everyone out there to use Linux, but until I see IBM using Linux, I won't believe it.
Bad Mojo
Bad Mojo
"If you can't win by reason, go for volume." -- Calvin
At least some divisions of IBM are "with it." I'm pushing to open source some of the UNIX stuff I'm doing for them and hope to start shoring up some areas where Linux has significant weaknesses if I can get the ball rolling on some of these projects.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
CmdrTaco: I WANT A LINUX THINKPAD WHERE THE MODEM WORKS!
IBM: You'll get it when we're finished and if you ask us again, we'll delay it another week.
They are a threat to free speech and must be silenced! - Andrea Chen
Fish! LipHo
Disclaimer: I am an IBM employee
/. readers. The announcement, as stated, applies to Enterprise Servers, which in IBM lingo means RS/6000, AS/400, and OS/3[7-9]0 machines.
Um, I think my friend Mr. Malda has confused some
As far as I can tell, this does not affect notebooks, PCs, and Netfinitys. They fall under a separate division of IBM and have their own "master plan". This is somewhat moot however, since Linux does run fairly well on these machines anyways.
As some readers insightfully pointed out, there are obvious motives for this. AIX, VMS, and VM are expensive to develop and time consuming to maintain, and IBM makes more money off the hardware anyways. IBM still has very strong hardware expertise, and the best reason to buy a RS6k is the hardware architecture (that and all the reliability aspects).
Don't have the misconception that IBM's enemy is Microsoft. Although we compete with them, our real competitor is Sun. Sun competes heavily in all the same areas we do, and Linux is the perfect way to help us fight the the workstation battle.
Since it is obvious to me that Sun has no intention of really supporting Linux until it begins to threaten their survival, I'm all for IBM and Linux partnership. This means IBM will contribute to linux kernel development for all of the products mentioned above, which should be quite valuable to Linus and Alan.
As for applications, that too falls under a different IBM division. I can't tell you if Notes or Smartsuite are coming for sure, but I wouldn't be suprised to see some changes in light of this announcement.
The opinions I post here have nothing to do with my employer.
I work in development for Big Blue and lots of us here love Unix in general and Linux in particular but no one can use it on the Desktop until Lotus comes up with "Notes for Linux". Now mind you no one actually likes Notes here, but if you want to get mail you don't have any other choice. I've gotten it to work using WINE but then its even more unstable than usual. Sigh.
Personally, I'm not sure I really see the significance of this. Big blue likes linux. Okay, fine. They'll sell servers running linux. Neat. But what are they going to do to develop linux? Are they going to contribute to the community, or are they just going to make a quick buck on everyone else's work without having to worry about NT licencing fee. Don't get me wrong; it's great to see more linux servers and workstations in the world, and any exposure is good exposure, but if anyone has the means to help development, it's IBM.
Too many corporations are looking at linux as a finished product, rather than a work in progress. It's not.
Bad things often happen to good people,
It is up to them to see that they remain good.