IBM WebSphere SE To Be Opened?

JoyToy writes ""AS PART OF its crusade to marginalize operating systems such as Windows, IBM is leaning toward giving the Standard Edition of its WebSphere application server to the open-source community." "

Comments

Whoda Thunk?

[brokeninside]

"The problem is that even if what they offer is 90 percent healthy and only 10 percent rat poison, the rat poison is still going to kill you," said Scott Hebner, director of e-business marketing at the IBM Software Group.

Holy Cripes! That could have come straight from the mouth of RMS himself! Who would have ever guessed that a corporate behemoth like big blue could start to grok the true advantages of open source?

Hebner said that should Microsoft gain the acceptance of a major industry-standards body such as the European Computer Manufacturers' Association for its forthcoming C# initiative, IBM would likely place support for C# on a par with Java given Sun's reluctance to make Java a truly open standard.

Now this has got to have both MS and Sun singing the blues. IBM, who currently has the fastest and best java implementation is promising to back C# if it gains status as an international standard. Ouch. Sun would lose its biggest ally on the Java front and MS would see its next attempt at world domination spinning out of Bill G's control.

And this is the part that really rocks my boat,

This point was reinforced in the most recent edition of the IBM annual report, in which company CEO and Chairman Lou Gerstner said that eliminating technology choke points is a key goal for the company.

Perhaps I need to go find a copy of the annual report, but it seems to me that Lou is stating that IBM wants to go full fledged open source to be a pure hardware + services company. I could be wrong, but I don't see what other technological choke points there could be....

Re:Dang, Now we got to find something else.

[the coose]

Since the company I work for has a deep distrust of anything open source...

So how's the weather in Redmond? ;-)