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IBM to unveil more Linux plans
Over at Financial times, there is a story about IBM which will unveil a Linux plan to invest 200 million dollars, helping companies to write Linux applications. Definitely worth a read. Thoughts anyone?
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Its non-commercial nature, however, means that no money is invested directly in the development of Linux, in contrast to competing products such as Windows, and the Unix operating system developed and sold by IBM, Compaq, SCO and others.
I'm glad that IBM is throwing this much money into developing apps and support for Linux, but I feel that they could also do something to help in the development of the kernel as well. It almost seems that, with this statement, that they are saying "Someone else can worry about that". Like they are taking advantage of the open source community.
Ok, I'm not totally against this, and this is a statement from the reporter and not from IBM themselves. But I think this is a point that most commercial companies are missing. It is actually to their advantage to offer some expertise to the free stuff. For one thing, it makes you look good in the eyes of the community (SGI sees this). And another thing (which RMS probably won't agree with), is that, by doing so, you can have more influence in the decisions that are made.
Steven Rostedt
Steven Rostedt
-- Nevermind
Nearly 50 fresh-faced engineers and entrepreneurs in San Jose and Cambridge work alongside IBM's sharpest minds on newfangled products and services, such as Linux systems management and pervasive computing devices. IBM employees manage the youthful groups.
Okay, so we probably wouldn't call Linux "newfangled", but it's food for thought for all you college seniors who want to work on open-source, and get paid.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
IBM's strategy is very smart--help APP developers start using Linux and there will be more apps--which means more users, which means more of everything for everybody.
But throwing money at the kernel people gets you nothing. The kernel people aren't driven by money. You might conceivably find someone who was unable to implement a feature due to lack of money, but all your money has bought is the feature--not apps that exploit the feature.
In short, IBM is throwing money at problems that benefit from having money thrown at them--but no farther.
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Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
IMHO, throwing big bucks at Linux is an attempt to turn Linux into a system that IBM can use to blow away Sun and DEC at the low-end, and boost their sales & support.
NOBODY spends money, unless they feel they're getting -some- return, of whatever kind that means something to them. In IBM's case, long-term survival versus "budget" systems (such as Wintel) and short-term improvement in relations with geeks and companies make for some plausable return that IBM might well want.
IMHO, also expect to see IBM and SGI work jointly on Linux. So far, both have been doing a lot of work in EXACTLY the same areas (journalled fs, Apache improvements, etc), and so it would make a lot of sense if they were to combine resources, rather than duplicate work.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Microsoft gave us the answer: look at their microsoft.net/whitepaper, read how they plan to change the world, and then, let's sit together and thinker how we, the people, can make something better, something worth living. We need free, standardized solutions for the following areas:
- A Privacy/Identity Framework
- Building Blocks for Net-Applications
- Governmental Tools
That's a lot, I know. And all the Biggies (Microsoft, AOL, Nokia, Media, TelCo's, etc.) will be fighting for defining the standards of the tomorrows net-world. We have to act now, in order to define our standards - you do know why, don't you?A Client/Server solution for identifing people in a secure manner, where *we* control our privacy. This is a must for serious e-commerce, e-governemt.
Tomorrows Net will be in the center of tomorrows society. Connected by mobiles, and a myriad of other devices, we will communicate, deal and live together digitally to a great extend. And we do not want to let a single corporate (or governmental) entity control how things will work.
The more we "live" on net, the greater will be the need for some control - that's what the government was for the old economy. In the new economy we want to define how this control works, who controls whom, what's right and what's not. This all depends on the infrastructure.
While I'm sure revenge is on the minds of those in charge (and mine actually) but IBM wouldn't waste millions for such as a lowly purpose. This type of revenge is what makes them happiest, a step into the future.
AIX (and the others) has been floundering for years. IBM has by this time put more money than most of us can imagine into developing UNIX/AIX software/hardware. We (should) all know what MS did to them.
Now comes an opprotunity to:
1. Regain a use for their most of software and hardware.
2. Seek revenge on Microsoft
3. Gain popularity with a community that used to hate it
4. Be one of the firsts in the market
5. Have all future developing & testing done free/cheap
Personally I wonder why more *IX companies aren't doing the same things.
Devil Ducky
Devil Ducky
MY peers would get out of jury duty.
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The press release from IBM is here: http://www.ibm.com/news/2000/07/21.phtml.
More interesting is the page at http://www.ibm.com/developer/ linux/eu_en/program.html which has a little more detail.
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IBM giving money to some "unknown" to develop software for the system they were building...
Whatever happened to them?
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Stupid sexy Flanders.
It's nice to see some of that money going back to the motherland, where it will be appreciated. I'll pretend that IBM is thanking Europe for developing Linux in the first place--except that I don't see Finland mentioned. :|
However, it's good to see that Intel is in on this one, too. Anything they can do to annoy Microsoft always entertains me.
Now, I don't expect a great degree of technical accuracy from the Financial Times, but I always snicker at that "running webservers" stuff. I guess that's all people care about. Forget that mundane crap like DNS, Mail, News, Timeservers, Database Servers, NFS, FTP Mirrors... All we know about is the web. Web pages, yeah, that's the ticket.
I'm not even going to mention compilers, image processing, clustering... I mean, really, who cares if it's not on the Internet? And if it isn't on the web, well, where can we find it? Isn't the Internet the web? Isn't that AOL? Ah well...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I don't mind software that's tied to a particular platform. While portability across platforms is a good thing, it isn't essential. I don't have any problem using software that's only available on one platform.
The problems, IMHO, are caused not by single-platform applications, but by single-application data formats. Software is just a tool for manipulating data. It doesn't especially matter which tool you use on which platform to manipulate a particular set of data, so long as you can transfer that same data to another platform and not be SOL. MS Office isn't bad because its only available for Windows, but because it works with data formats that aren't readily exportable to other platforms or applications.
Having said that, I do recognize the value of an application that runs across multiple hardware and software platforms. But, I don't see cross-platform software as being nearly as important as cross-platform data.
There's no such thing as Scotchtoberfest!
IBM has been pleasanly surprising us ever since they made Benjamin Sisko their Captain. Coincidence? I think the facts speak for themselves.
IBM Hardware:
It might not be the fastest, quietest, smallest, best looking, most cutting edge -
But by God is it reliable.
Once worked for a company with 43 IBM AS/400 machines, one at each of their sites. We had a disk crash about once a month.
Bad? They were all over 10 years old, and had NEVER been rebooted, or turned off. (Oh - and we never lost any data, the diags built into the hardware gave you just enough time to pipe the data off the disk before it went bang).
I would like an industrial IBM machine with Linux please - have it oiled and sent to my room immediately.
When I were your age, all round here were fields...
Cross-platform is hard to do. Java is a 'sporting try' at it, but it's still not quite there.
You said: Java isn't cross platform. Java is a platform.
Exactly right. Java's way of making the language cross-platform is to abstract the underlying platform. Hence the mention of VMs and hardware abstraction.
I can write a C/C++ that will run native, unchanged, optermised, on more platforms than I can think of.
Sure, "Hello World!" will port fine. But what use will it be?
Any actually usable (from the end-users perspective) program REQUIRES that it be interactive, hooked into the OS and hardware, and implemented within the reasonable real-world constraints of budget and schedule. Witness the problems between Gnome and KDE... Now add Windows and MacOS and BeOS and VMS and Solaris. If you can write a real-world app to span those, they'll give you a Turing for it.
Imagine what's involved in making something like Netscape 'source portable'. Or Office. Or even grep or vi... The underlying filesystems of UNIX and NT (for example) alone are so different that the size and complexity of the program become unreasonable, and you're better off developing parallel, platform specific versions.
The complexity required for a widely portable C/C++ application program calls for considering a HUGE number of #defs, testing it all, making it modular in the extreme and prevents timely development.
We're back to the VM, aren't we?
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
I spend years telling people to write cross platform code and now we get companies like IBM promoting Linux software.
I hate Linux software, I hate Windows software I'm fed up with this 'one OS to rule the world' crap.
I want cross platform software. Anything that says it works on Linux but not other unixes I don't touch with a barge pole. I get fed up with crap like "KDE, the popular Linux desktop". KDE runs on multiple platforms dammit, as does Gnome, Apache and all the other poster children of the so-called Linux revolution.
I have no interest in Linux software, only good, cross-platform free software.
Grrrrrrrr.......
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