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Memo Confirms IBM Move To Linux Desktop?
m5shiv writes "The Inquirer is reporting on an allegedly leaked internal memo from IBM CIO Bob Greenberg discussing IBM's move to a Linux desktop: 'Our chairman has challenged the IT organization, and indeed all of IBM, to move to a Linux based desktop before the end of 2005. This means replacing productivity, web access and viewing tools with open standards based equivalents.' The enemy of my enemy is my friend?"
IBM's internal email, expense reporting, project planning, etc. is already (supposed to be) Notes-based.
A couple facts from inside IBM. We've had a workstation build for Linux for quite some time, encompassing all basic business needs in IBM (Notes, corporate instant messaging, etc). Also, all of our HR and other internal applications are pretty much web and Java based, with a quiet directive that Mozilla will be our standard browser platform by 2005.
However, many groups use applications that cannot be replaced on Linux. My group, for instance, does nearly all of our work in Visio. I've looked at Kivio and others, and I can't begin to tell you how primitive they are. Also, at least my group does a lot of active development in Visual Basic to automate Visio and other programs.
Essentially what I'm saying is many basic users here may be able to move to Linux, but Windows will remain the primary client for the forseeable future, simply for the applications, integration, and relative ease of working with partners who use Windows.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
I worked at a phone company called US-West about 5 years ago, and they had over 1600 desktops running Linux as primary ... way back then. They used Citrix servers to get to that "compatible stuff"... well, MS Office. It certainly wasn't all desktops but it was certainly a nice chunk.
IBM isn't the first to take Linux seriously as a cost effective option for productivity.
The hardware of the time was woefully underpowered for the job. A high-end desktop in the early '90s had maybe 8 MB of RAM. Try running OS/2 2.0, CM/2 (the SNA protocol stack), and Win-OS/2 (Windows 3.0 hacked to run in a DOS session). Win-OS/2 was a requirement, because the 16-bit Windows applications of the time were vastly better than their 32-bit OS/2 counterparts when the latter even existed.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
The biggest hurdle is gonna be migrating Lotus Notes. Pretty much the entire world runs off Notes within IBM. (Except the stuff on VM, which is being phased out...) R5 runs fairly well (but far from flawlessly) under Wine, but R6 doesn't work at all.
I work at IBM, and Linux is the only OS I use. It's a little rough in some spots, but ultimately workable. For me, the combo is:
SameTime (The Lotus Messenger) => Sanity (a Perl based clone)
Notes R5 => Notes R5 under CrossOver Office
MS Office => MS Office under CrossOver Office (when needed)
If Linux were the official desktop, that would be awesome.
Note: While I work at IBM, I'm not in any of the areas which decide these issues, and have no information is support or refutation of the rumors in the report. (But I can dream...)
IBM created the PC and then basically "open sourced" the architecture. Who knows why they did this, because lots of people made big money off it, and IBM didn't see very much of that.
According to most of the books I've read concerning the history of the computer industry, it happened something like this:
The IBM PC was hurriedly slapped together with off-the-shelf parts because IBM wanted a piece of the burgeoning personal computer market, which was then practically owned by Apple. IBM knew that if they went through their normal development cycle and did everything in-house, the product would have been hopelessly late to market. So they assembled a team of people and told them to basically circumvent the normal IBM Way of Doing Things, and did so by buying almost every component they needed from outside vendors, including the OS, which came from a relatively small company called Microsoft (perhaps you've heard of them?). The only truly proprietary part of the PC was the BIOS.
Anyway, IBM went ahead with the PC because they thought that the proprietary BIOS would prevent anyone from duplicating the PC without getting trampled by IBM's lawyers. They also thought that the volume discount component prices they were getting could not be matched by any ragtag startup company. Compaq proved them wrong, first by reverse-engineering the BIOS and then producing an IBM PC clone profitably.
Phoenix also reverse-engineered the IBM BIOS, but instead of building their own PC clones with it, they began licensing their version to anyone who wanted to use it.
Then the hardware producers in Asia started stamping out shipping containers full of parts, component prices reached 'commodity' status, and IBM's perceived exclusive economies of scale were history.
Microsoft's non-exclusive terms with IBM let them license MS-DOS to anyone who wanted it, so the cloners were able to ship the same OS as IBM.
IBM still tried to compete, but their product cycle was twice as long as everyone else's. IIRC, Compaq was first to market with a 386-based system. IBM had defined the standards and then the cloners ran away with the market. Microchannel was IBM's attempt to regain the title of 'standard-bearer' for the computer industry, but the cloners took one look at the onerous licensing terms for MCA and said no thanks. They then formed their own coalition to develop standards for the hardware they were developing, and that was pretty much it for IBM as a force in the personal computing market.
So basically, IBM didn't "open source" their hardware purposely. They were victims of their own greed-- desperate to get a piece of the personal computer market as quickly as possible, they created an almost completely open system that was much more quickly and easily duplicated by third parties than they thought.
~Philly
Framebuffers are so passe! Modern hardware doesn't like you accessing its framebuffer. It prefers to work at a higher level. Consider the OpenGL rendering model:
Applications write drawing commands to a buffer.
When the buffer is full, the GL library makes a system call, and uses a special ioctl to DMA the command buffer into the graphics memory. The graphics card than carries out those commands.
That's very similar to how the X protocol works! You know why? Because both were designed to be abstract and network-transparent from the very beginning!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
You will find the commercial in realplayer, quicktime and mpeg for linux format here.
--> Insert Funny Sig Here
Nope. It's Ximian running RedHat. 7.2 I believe, whichever one came with the 2.4.9 kernal, don't remember.
and then we have Lotus Notes and Microsoft Office setup in Wine enivornments.
It's available for installation right now, however not everyone can use it because of certain applications that require specific things they've not gotten either emulated in Wine or replaced by a non-MS Specific application.
All you need is a diskette and about an hour and you too can wipe out your Windows Thinkpad or Desktop and off you go. Most of the engineering places that don't need a lot of the more verticle type applications like the Watson Labs and other labs have fully flipped to linux.
It's us types in the marketing/sales/customer facing environments that need specific apps that are holding us a back a bit.
Plus there's been no mandate. We all joke about it at tech conferences (I'm on the xSeries side) and such because everyone had 'heard' of this type of memo and a lot of our guys closer to using Linux more (IE not in the midwest but east and west coasts) have already converted over.
Most run VMware workstation to fire up windows on the rare opportunity that they need them. And the last guy I talked to about it as far back as August said he rarely ever needed to fire up Windows any more.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
For a project at work, I've been involved with changing a module that generated Word-DOC documents into code that delivered RTF.
The first step was to have Word convert it's own documents to see what happens, and Word does the same here as what FrontPage was famous for as well: Loads of markup code that isn't used (putting font code around an image, for example).
The most anoying part is that any in-document image is stored twice in Word-RTF. Once in hex-code, and once more in WMF-format. The latter will usually be 8 to 10 times the size of the hex-code representation, and can safely be removed. Word will still show your image normally... but should you save the document, it'd generate the WMF file inline again.
The code I wrote generated styled resumees, and the average document size went down from 150kb to around 10kb by switching to RTF. Opening and saving the file again in RTF with Word would bloat the file up to 2MB.
So, yes, RTF can be used to make styled documents the same as Word, and the document will actually be smaller, but don't let Word generate those documents for you. It'll bloat then.
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