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Interview With IBM's Chief Linux Strategist
Linux Magazine interviewed
IBM's chief
Linux strategist, Irving Wladawksy-Berger, about IBM and Linux. IBM sees Linux as a
disrupting technology of the same class as the Internet: an OS that can run on
many platforms and that nobody owns: something that can fundamentally change
the landscape of computing. By adding Linux compatability to AIX/Monterey, IBM
is guaranteeing itself a big-iron version of Linux without angering the
community by forking the kernel ... but they'd obviously also would like to see
big-iron features added to Linux. Interestingly, Irving suggests IBM would be
willing to open-source just about anything the Linux community wants ... one
just needs to make one's mind known at IBM's
developerworks site. Following the usual path, Linux adoption by
IBM was a bottom-up process, finally convincing senior management.
It's a shame that Linux Magazine did not ask about IBM's patent strategy, which was
already a hot topic two years ago when
slashdot
facilitated the release of the Jikes compiler.
Does that mean that IBM will put these major parts of Linux/S390 under an OpenSource license, as well?
-- jochen
1) Um, IBM is making oodles of money off the internet. A massive portion of the services business comes from "e-business" stuff sold to Fortune 500 companies. (IBM's traditional customers.) Also, DB2 and WebSphere are getting to be pretty popular among enterprise customers.
2) IBM doesn't make any money off of AIX. Yes, they do charge licensing fees, but mainly it is sold as something you need to buy to run your RS/6000.
IBM makes it's big money from the holy trinity of high-end hardware, industrial-strength software applications, and services/solutions. Low-end hardware (like 1U servers and PC's) and commodity software (like OS's) are only provided because they need to be if IBM wants to sell a "solution" instead of merely products.
IBM's other major profit streams are Technology (patent portfolio, Chip fab services, etc.), ThinkPads (simply because they kick ass and can take advantage of IBM's research in displays, hard drives, etc.), and leases/loans so customers can afford all this stuff.
If Linux could do what IBM needs, (more reliability, better I/O, etc.) they would likely drop AIX like a hot potato, because developing it ain't cheap.
Remember that the third letter in IBM is "Machines". IBM has always been more interested in selling hardware than software. If IBM provides top-notch support for Linux across their entire hardware line, it'll attract more buyers of their hardware as more and more businesses use Linux.
I'll admit that the default color scheme was designed to drain one's life force out through one's nostrils, but once customization of colors and behaviors was engaged in by the knowledgable user, its beauty had no limits.
If only I could go back to the days of reworking the launchpad with a few short sweet lines of rexx. ....
have a day,
-l
You're missing the major concept: reality.
A) Software has a cost too. Its called man-hours. If you hire a guy to dig a hole, are you going to tell him that you won't pay him, since digging a hole doesn't cost anything? By your reasoning, the book industry shouldn't exist either.
B) Nobody cares about the ethics or reason of being for the software industry. What people care about is that is brings billions of dollars into the economy, and makes the US the world power in computing. Best of all, software is very high-margin, which makes people rich. Rich people spend lots of money. Read up on the basics of capitalism.
C) In an economy, too much money can never be spent. Software is a great place to boost the total money-movement of the economy. Its mostly well-off people (people who can afford computers and software) paying money to other well-off people (programmers.) In the middle, you have tons of people who benifet, and a bunch of jobs created as a result. Software is a big push on the "New Economy."
D) I'm not talking about the fate of a free software projects, I'm talking about the economy. (BTW: Ever thought that having a hardware company support OSS software decreses the already small margins in the hardware industry?) Nobody has proven that OSS is a safe thing for the economy. You could argue that it should be legal for people to give away their software, but a lot of similar things aren't. You can't give away a lot of things. It's a very real possibility that free software could be dangerous for the economy (I'm not saying that it is, it could possibly be.) In that case, it would be regulated just like everything else.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
IBM also makes a lot of money on consulting and integration. That's why they can afford to be so platform-agnostic -- they sell you a solution based around whatever technologies you want, you pay them to configure and maintain it, everybody wins.
(This isn't the way most slashdotters probably like to do things, but a lot of companies rely on IBM's expertise so they don't have to develop any in-house.)
--
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
All that happened long after the IBM-Microsoft "divorce", and long after anyone had any realistic hopes of OS/2 getting any significant marketshare.
Like most dicussions of OS/2, yours seems to revolve around the period when Windows "Chicago" was very late, there was lots of frustration among PC users, and IBM was making a last ditch attempt at marketing OS/2 directly to consumers. This was around 1993-96. And, it has to be pretty frustrating, IBM employee or not, when you discover something pretty cool only to find out that it was being phased out soon afterward.
The thing to note is that OS/2 already had one foot in the grave at the point PCCO stopped shipping it on every model. IBM had it on the market since 1987, and it never recieved any significant corporate adoption, either as a workstation or a server OS. It's goal was to drive corporate host applications and IBM-style integration, and it utterly failed there after six plus years of trying. Only after the corps rejected the thing did IBM try to save it's hide by marketing it to power users.
Maybe one thing IBM learned from this is that they need to have 'grassroots' support in marketing something like an OS. Linux has it, Windows had it when they defeated OS/2, and maybe OS/2 had it, right at the bitter end. The "top down" approach of early OS/2 marketing was a huge factor in driving the power users into Microsoft's waiting arms.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
While at an engineering expo at my university, I spoke with a guy who works with Linux at IBM. He said that IBM has been doing lots of testing and r-and-d with Linux. He said that their experts are predicting that Linux will be the dominant OS in 4 to 5 years. He also said that IBM doesn't believe a lot of the current benchmarks with Linux, especialy those with high performance disk access and with SMP, and that IBM is in a position to help Linux immediately, but doesn't want do alienate the community by making it look bad. The guy sounded sincere and seemed to know what he was talking about. I'm looking forward to see what IBM has to offer Linux in the coming years
Of course, the poor support and IBM's unwillingness to break previous programs to fix major issues like the single system input queue didn't help matters much.
If you happen to be on the inside, you have access to the IBM internal forums. The OS/2 Advocasy one was about half bitter bitching and moaning about how badly IBM fucked up with OS/2 and about half Linux advocasy. Many of the OS/2 people I knew inside and outside went to Linux after it became apparent that IBM was never going to do what needed to be done with OS/2.
In a way it's better. IBM doesn't own Linux so they can't screw it up like they did with OS/2. It's not nearly as succeptable to the FUD as OS/2 was, and it's not being maintained by a bunch of people who think PCs are toys that you use as dumb terminals to the Big Iron.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
But IBM looks a lot like Cisco - sure, they've got patents coming out of their wazoo, but they don't use their strength to control the market(so it seems. One can't be too sure).
:p
The Justice department already called Big Blue on that tactic..
Your Working Boy,
Basically, I don't think you realize how intimately entwined parts of the kernel are. Even if you put the "big iron" code in separate files, changes elsewhere would break it every minor release.
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
When Linux Mag notes that Linux is more a "development methodology" than an operating system, Wladawksy-Berger neatly sidesteps the issue, merely responding that it's important that developers can easily port their apps between Linuces. (He does add a bit of abstract and highly-qualified praise for community-based development.) Truth is, IBM won't change their internal design lifecycles that easily, and, for the most part, I don't think they need to.
....
Nonetheless. This is exactly what Linux needs: a high-end, organizationally-driven addition that will help make Linux a viable choice in the enterprise arena. For the first time, I'm starting to consider Linux a real competitor for my business. I'm not ready to turn in my E10K yet, but
Did anyone pick up an undercurrent of glee when the dude compared who uses Windows (half the class raised their hands) and who uses Linux (the whole class raised their hand).
MS should never have fck'ed over IBM wrt to OS/2, Big Blue has a long memory, and the board probablt has wet dreams of stomping on MS's grave.
Does anyone know of any technical reasons why you can't just have some kernel option 'big iron' that switches all the right things on when you want them?
dnnrly
The IBM developerworks page announces that IBM will open-source AFS later on, which is far more important than their open-sourcing of JFS, imho. While ARLA exists and is cool et al., the real thing is still a notch better.
IBM is growing in my regard every second. Now if they only sent me some old hardware with the MCA-bus... :^)
Why not have them opensource all the parts of OS/2 that they legally can do so and the entire API so that Linux can be made to run OS/2 programs the way it is trying to do for Windows with Wine. Of course code from the GUI engine could move towards merging w/ X and/or forming an alternative GUI for Linux.. mmmm OS/2 Tux.. finally a new version of OS/2. :)
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
This interview underscores the fact that "embracing open source" for most traditional UN*X outfits means that Linux is labeled a low end solution while offering an alternates for High end applications.
It seems that Linux is adding to the profit for these companies because they can sell more low end machines with an OS that more and more people are familliar with. This saves them development time and programers because most of the OS is open source. They also keep their high end UN*X for the Big Iron or special computing problems(like beating a chess champion or folding a protein).
Interesting business plans with the OS community doing a lot of leg work for the higher volume lower priced units. Is this the wedge that many OS companies are looking to drive into Microsoft?
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
This has already discussed in a previous story today, and nobody came up with a satisfactory answer as to why there can't be 2 memory subtrees, one for big iron and one for desktops with the same API. I know that it's duplication of effort, but considering that the kernel is extremely well managed at the moment it wouldn't be as hard as it would be in a corporation where every manager has their own political agenda. It's obvious that there is a huge difference between the IA32 and S/390 architecture and different issues apply. It does make me smile though, to think of my favourite OS running every computer on earth at some point, especially when Bill Gates, at the launch of Windows 2000, stated that his product was now ready to take on mainframe-type jobs. That was probably the funniest IT-related statement I've heard this year.
Actually, SOM has been ported to Windows already, so it shouldn't be too terribly hard.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
These are interesting times, my friends. Another clash of the Titans. I just read today about M$'s DataCenter, a big-iron release of its Windows 2000 Server. will run on machines with 32 processors and loads of RAM. It's supposed to be Microsoft's best challenge to date to *nix systems. IBM should get linux compatibility and get it quick!
I need a TiVo for my car. Pause live traffic now.
"To be honest, we'd open source just about anything the community wanted."
Then open source the GUI engine for OS/2. This would give Linux an alternative to X, and one that is less resource hungry.
But, as you point out, if this happened to Linux,
But that is the the point, isn't it? IBM can't pull a tricks like OCO, because in order to do so, they would have to violate the GPL. Granted, I'm sure that a company with the resources that IBM has could find a legal loophole (or have one legislated) that would allow them to do an end run around the GPL... but with each piece of software they release to the community under an open source license, they invest a little bit more in the idea that those licenses are valid. It doesn't take long for that investment to reach the point where IBM will rabidly defend open source licenses because a failure to do so would result in their competitors being able to take their software and do something like OCO to them.
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
My question is simple - does this cheif strategist primate use Armed Linux or his native Monkey Linux?
click here to incinerate homeless people
There is also some talk of actually having a fork in the code so that there can be a big iron Linux and regular Linux, by the way.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
This is a good point: IBM hates Linux as much as it hates the Internet because it can't profit from it. However, big blue can do something to Linux that it can't do to the internet: package it and slap on it's hyper-rasterized logo. Looks like we can expect this "pig-iron" version of Linux very soon!
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Interesting. Very much as I thought. I guess the frustration is all-the-higher because at the time (1990) MS was the little guy and IBM was still Big Bad Blue.
So IBM really couldn't gain any support even though MS was in the wrong.
Well -- what goes around, comes around.
Okay, so I don't buy millions of dollars worth of hardware every week. I may not arrange licensing agreements with IBM. But IBM looks a lot like Cisco - sure, they've got patents coming out of their wazoo, but they don't use their strength to control the market(so it seems. One can't be too sure). The fact that they're willing to GPL stuff sort of supports that idea.
Dave
'Round the firewall,
Out the modem,
Through the router,
Down the wire,
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)