IBM Releases Desktop Linux Presentation

An anonymous reader writes "DesktopLinux.com, in coordination with the Desktop Linux Consortium, is making select presentations from Monday's groundbreaking Desktop Linux conference at Boston University's Corporate Education Center available. Sessions from the well-received program included talks from key companies and open source projects bringing Desktop Linux into the enterprise. The first presentation available is from IBM's Sam Docknevich, Linux and Grid Services Executive for IBM Global Services and is titled "Open Source Desktop - Directions for today... and Tomorrow". His presentation discusses IBM's push into the Linux desktop market, an initiative from inside Big Blue."

Comments

IMHO, Open source is bad for the economy

[Anonymous Coward]

It annoys me that Linux developers try to compete with commercial companies. Listen: you are destroying bussiness! Sun will probably be the first casualty. With no commercial companies left, there will be no innovation. I propose the following "constitution" for open source developers:

1) I will freely license my code for use in commercial products (ie, use BSD license not GPL.)
2) If a commercial equivalent exists for what I'm developing, I will not try to market it as a replacement for the commercial product.
3) My software will not be targeted at the average consumer (read: no easy to use UI, no easy installation process).

So basically, you can develop research software, specialized software, etc. But please, if no-one buys MS Office and d/ls openoffice instead, innovation in word processors and spreadsheets will stop. We do not want this.

Re:IMHO, Open source is bad for the economy

[andrewa]

Hey Bill G./Steve B., you forgot to log in.

Question?

[niko9]

What's to prevent IBM from releasing an all in one Linux desktop solution? Linux + IBM Power PC + a IBM reference desktop motherboard? Something with AGP, built in sound, USB 2.0 and firewire.

Why woudn't IBM want to do this. Could mass adoption of these chips drive their prices down and make them competetive with INtel and AMD chips?

Would that make sense? If not, why so?

-

And yet:

[Anonymous Coward]

1) You can't buy a IBM Thinkpad unless it comes with Windows. That 'old "Microsoft tax"

2) IBM can't be bothered to support FreeBSD on their laptops. Public case in point - the use of Type 165 for the partition that held the backup info. Private case - IBM staffer claimed they'd help with a USB implementation issue on one type of Thinkpad. (The USB doesn't work at all with FreeBSD and the only way Linux works is if you force the probe order in some wonky way.)

3) Many of the new style Thinkpads come with the Intel wireless - the one only supported under Windows.

I'll believe IBM cares about Open Source when they address the 3 above. Otherwise its the swapping of one corporate master for another.

Re:And yet:

[fw3]

Well yeah, you're talking laptops, which are still a far cry from well supported by Linux. Look at their servers, Netfinity units I picked up on ebay nearly 3 years ago used Linux-boot cds w/ java for Raid-controller configuration.

1. the number of buyers for thinkpads with linux is tiny. IBM has in fact shipped some models with linux pre-installed but as a general move, linux on laptops is still pretty chancy, why should they put all that effort into somthing that obviously will generate no return.

2. See 1, if the market for Linux on laptops is small, the market for fbsd on laptops is that much smaller. As it happens I have installed fbsd on my Thinkpad, don't use usb so don't care but I do/did care that it corrupted my linux partitions and completely fails to recognize the OpenBSD disklabel.

3. See 1. latest-hardware drivers on Linux has always lagged. with 99% of the market, sure windows drivers get written right off. Funny how revenue will cause code to get written.

Re:And yet:

[hbo]

1) You can't buy a IBM Thinkpad unless it comes with Windows. That 'old "Microsoft tax"

Sad, but true.

2) IBM can't be bothered to support FreeBSD on their laptops. Public case in point - the use of Type 165 for the partition that held the backup info. Private case - IBM staffer claimed they'd help with a USB implementation issue on one type of Thinkpad. (The USB doesn't work at all with FreeBSD and the only way Linux works is if you force the probe order in some wonky way.)


That's not the case with current ThinkPads. And though it was an inexcusable blunder when they initially committed it, IBM fixed the problem with a BIOS update 3-4 months after they were pummeled by the FreeBSD community (Link to my 2 cents worth of pummeling.)


3) Many of the new style Thinkpads come with the Intel wireless - the one only supported under Windows.

Of course, that's the case with any Centrino based laptop out there. It's Intel's worry, not IBM's.

I'll believe IBM cares about Open Source when they address the 3 above. Otherwise its the swapping of one corporate master for another.

Corporations are fictional legal persons. They don't "care" about anything. People within corporations do. A lot of people within IBM care about open source. Andrew Tridgell works for IBM, for example. IBM has embraced Open Source for a variety of reasons, but in my opinion they all boil down to this: Free and Open Source Software gives IBM an advantage over its rivals in the competition to sell Information Technology to global business. IBM will attempt to assist its customers in saving money through the use of

1. Cheap hardware. This means Intel and AMD today. In the future, it could mean Power, if the latest supercomputer offering is any indication.
   
2. Cheap(er) Software. This avoids the Microsoft tax and "sticks it to" a major competitor. IBM isn't pretending that free-as-in-beer software is actually cost free.
3. Superior services. IGS is poised to win a lot of business helping customers realize cost savings by switching to the first two bullets.

IBM has lots of other irons in the fire with regard to Linux, but those are the ones I see most clearly. The fact that they are focussing on Linux and not FreeBSD is a function of the marketplace. Linux is the OS that the largest percentage of the FOSS community has gotten behind. IBM wishes to leverage this energy for its own purposes.

This may be cynical, but consider that the effort has resulted in substantial (many 100's of millions of dollars worth of) contributions of code by IBM to Linux, Java and many other projects, the hiring of many FOSS authors, to work on their own projects, substantial direct cash support for OSDL and others and the hiring of lots of folks who really do care about FOSS, though they may not be codejockies.

Finally, IBM is fighting a lawsuit aimed at stopping the forward momentum of Linux, and by extension, the rest of FOSS. One result of this suit could be the legal validation of the GPL, which would be a huge step forward for the entire community, even those that prefer the BSD or some other license.

So, IBM may be pursuing its own interests, but they are making a lot of moves that hugely benifit FOSS. The committment is long-term, but even if it weren't, what IBM has done up to now deserves recognition.

Disclaimer: I now work for IBM. But I made my decision to join them by considering the points I just made.

Credible

[Mostly a lurker]

This is a truly excellent presentation, as we would expect from IBM. For enterprises, there are two specific aspects that will really inspire confidence:

1. IBM has over 15,000 existing internal Linux clients and this is rapidly expanding.

2. There is no attempt to gloss over potential issues, such as browser incompatibility with IE and weaknesses so far in supporting knowledge workers. These are accepted, but demonstrated to be applicable only to certain categories of users.

The general message, which is convincing, is to look at each user segment separately and objectively and use Linux where it makes sense at the time.

Re:TODO List For Linux Desktop

[spoonboy42]

Just a few notes here:

1. Mozilla is actually quite fast, especially compared to the competition (in essence, Internet Explorer). The monolithic Internet suite approach definitely does introduce some unnecessary overhead, but as Mozilla moves towards a modular model based on Firebird and Thunderbird, you can expect this to be remedied. The only major desktop browser that's left to consider, really, is Safari. Well, as it happens, Safari is based on KHTML, and the advantages of the very lightweight and speedy Safari are all present on Linux with Konqueror (which, incidentally, doesn't have the additional CPU/GPU overhead associated with Apple's Quartz framework).

2. X is not a bad framework. Features like network-transparency and the like are, in fact, VERY important in environments where thin-clients/servers are common. XFree86, in particular, is being forked every which way at the moment which, while at first glance seems like trouble, will probably wind up introducing some very interesting innovations, both in terms of processing and memory-efficiency and eye-candy. In the meantime, XFree86 provides a compatible, stable base that is more than fast enough on modern desktop hardware.

3. KDE and GNOME are not one-size-fits-all desktop environments. They are designed to be flexible and extensible and, as such, they tend to be more complex than, say, XP's Luna or the Mac's Aqua (incidentally, Luna absolutely sucks eggs as far as speed and bloat go, and while Aqua is admirably efficient given all that it does, one still must consider all that it does in terms of rendering iCandy). This flexibility is not necessarily a weekness, as it allows a desktop to be tuned for a particular user's needs, ranging from thin-client type apps to my dual-display K desktop littered with SuperKaramba themes. Anyway, what I'm getting at is that feature-set vs. performance is not a huge issue on modern desktops, and in places where it is (like embedded systems) Linux has very sleek, slim alternatives that still manage to be pretty and functional (like, for example, Opie). There are also desktop alternatives available for the KDE and GNOME-hating, thanks again to the modularity of X keeping the window manager and the display server seperate, ranging from GNUStep to Ratpoison.

4. You've got a point about OpenOffice, I must admit. It's not necessarily a bad system, but then again, it's not really anything more than an Office clone. A free and very portable Office clone, but an Office clone nonetheless. One of the good things about Linux desktop software that I mentioned above is that it doesn't try to recreate Windows or Mac with precision, but rather provide a very flexible framework that can be adapted to the user's needs. OpenOffice definitely doesn't fit in with this philosophy, but I'm sure that there are other projects going on out there working to redefine how we think of Office suites. And if not, somebody ought to get to work on that. ;)

5. Just a side note, Fedora isn't exactly the examplar of Linux's efficiency and performance. Go Gentoo!

What all the above boils down to is this: Does Linux have a way to go before becoming the perfect desktop OS? Certainly, and work is ongoing towards this goal. However, we must also ask another question: Is Linux, at this moment in time, a better choice than Windows or Mac for many users and businesses? Absolutely, and it's looking better every day.