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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?"
The enemy of my enemy is .. useful.
Its nice to see that the chairman has made a stand but has also made sure that they will remain compatible to the rest of the business world. As much as we might all like Linux to survive in the business world we need to be able to speak what everyone else speaks. It might be good to have the moral high ground but its no good if you can't read your suppliers documents Rus
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IBM's a large, large company with abundant resources in the area of software design. They've got the ability to tailor-design an OS to the needs of their company and deploy it enterprise-wide, and with Linux and friends, do it without losing much cross-platform compatibility.
A similar switch might be tougher for other large organizations with widescale Windows deployments, where a few lightly-customized Win2k images might be the most they can currently support.
They'll come around eventually...
That they use this oportunity to learn from any issues, take data from the user base, and add to Linux.
With any large deploy of a new system, there will be issues, and if they can correct those and/or customize it for there need in house they will make a great selling point for other corporations.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Why shouldn't IBM move to linux? They are basically fighting for linux against SCO (yes I know, it's about AIX, but linux is there too), if they are dumping so much money into killing/beating SCO, why not use the software they are fighting for themselves. They have the resources to develop and support it themselves.
(I guess that rates a big DUH!)
;-)
But the business reason probably has something to do with Longhorn shipping 2006ish, and avoiding paying an upgrade fee to MS for desktops for over 300,000 employees worldwide. Even if the upgrade costs them just $79 and they only have to upgrade 100,000 computers, they could still save a cool $7.9 million by switching to a Linux desktop.
You talk about an MS tax, an additional $7.9 million looks good on anyone's bottom line. I wish IBM good luck with this one!
Of course, if they got rid of PC's altogether and replaced them with 3270 terminals and daisy wheel printers, they would be able to save $$$ on desktop management costs.
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Of course IBM could also see a huge cost savings over time as well, and provide a true real-world case for negating the ridiculous "TCO" whipping horse MS continues to fabricate results against.
I don't think this makes sense from a productivity standpoint. Most of us probably believe that linux wins a TCO fight with Windows, but that would not be the case if you had to develop all your basic tools from scratch, even for IBM.
No, this is about eating their own dog food. It's not a good message when you're pushing your product but you use other products. If IBM is to convince buyers to use Linux for typical desktop productivity work, they better use it themselves.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
In my wife's small business the only obstacle to going to a linux desktop is vender tools such as UPS worldship and Stamps.com, etc.
I'm sure they, like every other (for-profit) corporation out there are not doing it out of altruism, but that they are doing it is the important thing. They are probably doing it mostly because it makes sense to them business-wise -- both because of cost savings and because of the example it sets for other companies to follow (in which case the IBM consultants will be sitting there waiting to sell them services and extras) -- and perhaps to spite microsoft too, but that again is in their business interest.
What are you talking about? It's a two way street: IBM has also contributed a lot to he open source world.
If those well meaning volunteers had not wanted others to use and perhaps even profit from their work, they wouldn't have released it under the GPL, would they?
IBM is a corporation whose main reason for existence is to make money and maximize shareholder value. Things like these have absolutely nothing to do with their "support" of free software.
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It's so funny how everyone here cheers IBM like this because they're "sticking it to teh M$". Have you seen the source code to DB2 or Notes lately?
IBM is a corporation whose main reason for existence is to make money and maximize shareholder value. Things like these have absolutely nothing to do with their "support" of free software.
Most major closed-source software projects contain large chunks of code licensed from other people. It is quite possible that good portions of DB2 and Notes are licensed from others.
The cost of a code audit on something like that can be enormous. Google for Bruce Perens' comments about when HP let OpenMail go -- and why he advised *against* open sourcing it.
Supporting open source and maximizing shareholder value aren't mutually exclusive. IBM is a very large services organization. They can and do make quite a bit of profit supporting other people's stuff.
-Charles Hill
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
... glad they're supporting open-source software, but I wonder how much of their support is in recognition of the value of open-source, and how much is just to spite Microsoft?
Well, 20 years ago I worked for several employers that had a big IBM mainframe (and minis were just coming in). What did the mainframe run? It ran VM, of course, plus whatever subsystems the various departments liked.
And where did VM come from? Uh, it was developed in academia. It was an open-source project from the start, though the term hadn't been invented then. IBM tried to downplay it for a few years, and then embraced it as they realized it was a Good Thing for everyone.
VM came with full source (I saw a fair amount of it), and there wasn't any problem showing it to people. IBM supported it, and they also happily accepted bug fixes from anyone.
I was in the engineering department, and one day we brought in Amdahl's version of unix that ran on VM. We joked about installing it over the dead bodies of a lot of IBMers. But the IBM reps themselves didn't have a problem with it. They were curious, and several wished they could supply something so useful. The "dead IBMer bodies" were the local people who thought that IBM was a religion and we'd invited in a devil. The actual IBM employees thought these people were stupid. Their attitude was more like "If it help customers use our machines, we're all for it."
In fact, IBM has long supplied software like VM that they didn't develop. Having lots o useful apps has always been a good tool for selling the hardware. And they have long supported at least some non-IBM software, because much of their income comes from support contracts.
IBM has long been a mixed pack of very good guys and very bad guys, with a lot of people ethically in the middle. Like any other giant monopolistic corporation.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Go Big Blue! It's about time for you to take back the innovation crown those monkeys in Redmond pretended to wear.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
And this is the one big problem with participants in the Open Source movement (note: not with Open Source, per se): There are many fine Open Source apps, but the majority of them are by developers for developers. We need to look more at what business needs out of Open Source. Hate PowerPoint? Well business wants it. Hate Access dB? Well, business loves it. And without any question, until OpenOffice addresses these issues full force, especially all the bells and whistle of Excel, "enterprise" businesses will not migrate the desktop. It really is going to be all about business applications if we want to win the desktop war.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
IBM stands to make a killing migrating companies to linux. This is a great chance for them to experience the migration for themselves in a way that sending a few engineers to remote sites never can, and it's probably a lot cheaper for the amount of knowledge they'll get out of it. Obviously this is more than just an experiment, but it clearly makes good sense for them to say to the world "We did it, and we'll help you do it too."
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
I believe IBM is in the GNOME camp.
/. ;-)
....
Yeah, I've heard that rumor, too. Probably here on
And it's the significant part. After all, linux is an OS kernel. It isn't a UI. The phrase "linux desktop" is utterly nonsensical. Any X-Windows "desktop" will run on linux.
The sensible thing for IBM or any other vendor to do is settle on a reasonably good window manager, and start building an integrated UI based on it. Gnome would work fine, as would KDE or Enlightenment or FVWM or CDE or
What wouldn't make sense if you're looking for a near-term market is starting your own window manager project. This would delay a lot of the integration work and put your "integrated desktop" package several years in the future.
This could be a deal with the devil for the Gnome folks, though. IBM has a long history of turning reasonable packages into bureaucratic monstrosities. If you think Gnome is bloated from featuritis now, just wait until you see IBM's extensions.
Has anyone here seen PL/I? Or used JCL?
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Anybody remember the mid 1980s?
The Mac was gonna set the world on fire. It did desktop publishing to beat all hell. But not Lotus 1-2-3 so one got put in the graphics department and everybody else got PCs. And Lotus.
The Amiga was one of the neatest computers ever made, it outperformed the PC in every respect... but it never ran Lotus 1-2-3. Two businesses bought them and they were gone within 5 years.
Whatever software your idiot boss needs to run dictates the platform the company and businesses in general, will use. There are simply no exceptions to this rule.
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seems to equate the use of linux with all the worlds best in their respective fields of expertice.
See, now, that's funny, because, to me, that commercial seems to equate Linux with a dopey sci-fi movie or one-season TV show.
What it *doesn't* equate to is the fleeting suspicion that anybody in the commercial knows anything about computers, software, operating systems, or OSS. I mean, they *might*, but you'd never know it from the commercial
Erm, the commercial is ABOUT OSS. Think about it. They say "we have this kid, his name is Linux" Linux learns everyday from the foremost experts around the world. As Linux grows he becomes stronger, faster, better, smarter. Linux absorbs everything around him. That is the essence of OSS, and that is what happens in the commercial. The idea is to get people who do not understand software to understand this fundamental fact of OSS.
Four words. Open Office dot org. Unless there's really fancy crap in that .DOC file (which Open Office usually ignores gleefully) it will open the .DOC easily.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Sigh. No, replacing X11 with a framebuffer is not a good idea. OS X quartz is not a framebuffer interface and neither is the Win32 gdi. Go see www.freedesktop.org and see how X11 is coming kicking and screaming into the 21st century, doing things we never thought possible, all within the X11 framework, which is really showing remarkable durability. Within the year, X11 will have a compositing manager as powerful as quartz's compositing server and possibly even more flexible and powerful. And very fast too. The interesting thing about Keith Packards work with double-buffering windows is that the apparent speed of the screen drawing apears to be much faster than without the special effects.
And you can pry my network transparency from my cold dead hands.
I agree that GNUStep is pretty cool, but it's main problem, much to my chagrin, is that it's ugly! GNUStep looks like they took OSX, ripped out all the cool quartz stuff, and then asked, "what can we do to make this interface the ghastliest, most horridly ugly thing the world has ever seen?"
Seriously, I'd rather eat dogshit than try to look at a GNUStep screenshot, it's just that terrible.
If IBM wants to take GNUStep and make it sexy, more power to them, but in the meantime, KDE will remain the coolest, most gorgeous linux desktop environment available.
But I quietly wait for the day when stupid managers are replaced by smatter managers who realize that Excel, Access, and its ilk only create drones that copy and paste all day, tend to their macros that greatly complicate "simple" programming problems(therefore, must be tended to), and create "irreplaceable employees" that you can't fire because what they do is so poorly documented the business would stop running for an unexceptable time if you did (hmm, what does this cell do . .
I can't wait . . . until outsourcing to India and China makes programming so cheap that all those drones who think they are "knowledge workers" can finally be set free to get real careers because companies can now afford masters of Perl and the DBI module to actually bring back efficiency and dignitiy to the human race by expressing human thought in a burst of insightful code ONCE, instead of mindless clicks and grunts every month, an endless cycle of futility.
Mind you, these new knowledge workers will most likely be home grown, once unemployed programmers who went back to school to learn accounting and finance. They will believe in solving the same problem ONCE and will not be afraid to code to get the job done. They will also have seen how accountants have bettered their own profession by making it independent of corporate interests and hopefully will bring the same to the IT profession (which I will work hard to become a member of).
Until then, it is back to writing Perl to deal with the stupidity that apps like Excel and Access breed . .
Seek the truth, and ye will find Open Source.
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Times have changed. IBM is no longer the monolithic giant that dominates and overtakes everything - they're at the size where either significant growth or significant growth loss is fairly difficult without catastrophic catalyst. They're no longer a significant threat to the 'little guy' either, as they used to be - and as MS is now.
Think about it. IBM has quite thoroughly embraced linux, and is moving in more of that direction every day. Linux's very core philosophy is that of openess and unrestriction - the very philosophies that monopolies fight against.
The only thing (at least from the business perspective) IBM gains by embracing linux is to move the power away from MS. From that point, where does the power go?
Well, obviously, it draws power from AMD and Intel and more towards IBM for PPC processors, since linux works just fine on PPC processors, but in terms of software, they gain nothing. You can't 'take' something that is given away, as linux is.
Instead of power migrating from MS to IBM in the rise of linux, power migrates to the people - the populace and citizens. That's democracy.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
>>Ali was a pacifist
Ali physically beats other men into submission for millions of dollars.
If he is a pacifist, I'd hate to see the warmongers from his clan...
Well, actually he does not do a lot of boxing nowadays. Parkinsons will do that to you.
Boxing is a sport. The participants in a boxing ring are fighting based one defined rules and are there of their own free will. I have never seen evidence that Ali ever caused more damage to an opponent than was necessary to win the fight. Likewise, boxers are usually not fighting to settle a dispute, they are playing a game.
Ali did not as far as I know ever ever advocate violence to solve problems in his life or the world. Yes, boxing is a violent sport like football and rugby, etc. But it is a sport and a game, not a violent means of resolving conflict.
Performance is fine, features are fine. Everytime I read one of these, I grow a bit more frustrated.
The X Window system is possibly one of the best features in Linux right now, not to mention the number of applications (basically just about all of them) written to take advantage of it. The ability to remote the display is a powerful thing that allows for many compute options not easily done with single-user framebuffer based systems. (All of them are single user, unless you count some wierd dual head setup.)
We need to work harder at presenting Linux in a useable way, not stripping it to look like the other OSes out there right now.
X11 is what makes Linux a true multi-user operating system. It is a big part of where the power is. Why come all this way only to give up one of the core values?
Lets say we actually do this. All the new applications then get written for the frame buffer. Single users might gain some small benefit from a bit lower complexity (which can and will be solved in presentation), but everyone else loses. The money is in the corporate systems and that is where X11 plays hard. Application servers delivering applications to desktops over X11 are easy to administer and cost effective. Client-server just cannot compare really.
Rather than nuke one of our killer enterprise features to make Linux work for isolated single users, we need to continue to work hard at getting Linux in front of brand new users and schools. People that begin with Linux are not going to have any trouble with it. They will grow with Linux as it continues to mature, the result over time will be better for everyone.
Those running the current win32 systems are all going to want things the way they have them now. Giving that to them is not worth it because that is accepting their way at a lower cost, and that is just not what OSS is about. OSS is about powerful software with freedom built in from the beginning, not software designed around the competition.
We can continue to build Linux just the way it is now and slowly the others will either:
1.) See the light and join us,
or
2.) Continue doing what they are doing. (while paying a lot for the option of doing so)
Either way, OSS will continue as it has, which means tossing X11 (which making it an addon is doing) won't be worth it.
Linux is pretty easy now and we are only at the beginning! Lets keep it intact for a bit longer before taking such drastic measures.
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People like you make me really mad. But then I have to remember that you're only ignorant. The terrorists and Talebans of the world don't actually follow Islam. They say they do, sure, but none of their questionable practices are written anywhere in the Quran. In fact, I do not know of a single nation in the world today that follows Islam in its true form. Islam, unlike other reigions, has a secular component too, describing how business and law are to be conducted. This is to be done fairly and equally, men and women.
Then again, all religion sucks, but if you're going to put it down, know what you're putting down and atleast know what to call it.
Novell bought Ximian. Novell bought SuSE. IBM invested $50M in Novell.
Any bets that IBM's corporate desktop looks a lot like Ximian running on SuSE?
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
According to this article, IBM currently has 320,000 employees. With these numbers (I'll assume 1 system per employee avg.) and their clout/connection with ISVs, this is bound to ensure more business apps ported to Linux. I'm sure as a result of this, M$'s competitors will now be chomping at the bit to port to Linux to sell to IBM plus get them to promote their wares.
Yet another idiotic complaint that X11 is holding Linux back.
The other replies to this handle the technical details fine. All I have to add is that I have been using X11 for years on funky 386s and up and never felt the GUI was any kind of bottleneck. If it worked fine on a 33Mhz 386, even if the screen wasn't as big, why the dickens won't it work on 3Ghz Pentiums and Opterons? Why is it that as processors and memory get faster and faster, more oddballs come out of the woodworks screaming about what a pig dog X11 is?
Infuriate left and right
Excuse me for still having some scepticism in my brain, but if I was running IBM, I would have already set as much of this up as feasible by the back door and then announce publically that I was going to do it on a quite short timeframe. Then when I succeed I can go to other companies "look, it's predictable and safe". Companies hate change, employees hate change, it's risky or just plain annoying so if you really want to get the huge organisations to take this sort of a change seriously, you are going to have to be able to provide serious evidence.
Leaving scepticism (which was fueled by a comment refering to a base desktop build which already exists in IBM) aside, this is so logical it's simple! If IBM transfer their own business over to IBM's own software across the board, then they have a constantly provable business environment which they can sell and support on their own hardware. They can return to selling one stop shops, but by basing the underlying systems (as far as they commit to) on Free software, they completely disarm the feeling of being forced to choose between evils, you can choose a potential evil and feel free to walk away (well you might be replacing lots of hardware if you completely drop them) with your system. IBM could effectively start getting end customers to foot the bill for Free software development by IBM and the more of that work they are doing, the more of the work they are likely to get. The rules (well the licenses of most software they would be likely to use) prevent a monopoly, but IBM's power is huge and hence it could attract business to a monopolistic level, at least until a new tiger appears which can take it on in the newly expanded market. IBM don't need software licensing revenue, IBM can exist for the rest of time on it's name provided they can provide people with dependable solutions (i.e. they can charge a profit margin others would dream of, just because it's IBM).
What dissappoints me is that this all makes me recall many moments while I worked for Corel International Linux Support when I tried making people see the benefits of eating our own dogfood. I truly felt (though I mattered squat) they should have moved the next (or following if already too late) version of their Office and Draw suites to QT (or gtk, I only really say qt as they had already committed to KDE on the desktop and had peeople working on it) and start consolidating on their work. They were deciding what system to buy for the Linux Support desk, and I asked why they didn't just adopt a free one! Moving over all their hosting to Linux was another issue and one that was more important in their minds (and judging by netcraft it seems they achieved something there I wasn't expecting anymore). It was interesting however to watch the various reactions from managers to administrators, support staff to developers when they realised they had a bit of a Free software zealot in their midst! I even managed to get in my digs at visiting big-wigs (something makes me think that isn't why Corel left the country though). Corel had an opportunity, but they didn't even try (in fact I wonder why they even bothered starting with Linux if they weren't going to go down this route).
IBM would have to be insane not to try this. Really it is a case of when they feel they should make the jump to best effect, and if IBM feel that now is the time to do it, you can be sure it is very doable (for them) because egg on the face here could cost IBM massively and for a long time. I can't help feel that this has been in the works ever since they lost out on OS/2 and if the MS V Linux "Get The Facts" can be taken as evidence that MS is scared, this should be taken as evidence that MS should be petrified! If IBM do follow through with this, the impact in having all the IBM employees worldwide proficient with GNU/Linux/X/??/?? would be significant apart from the developments you would be sure would be seen in each piece o
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
Actually, I think that this is more an illustration of Sun Tzu's principle that taking the city without fighting is the best case. In this instance, IBM, by embracing open source and Linux while agreeing to sell hardware and software from competitors like HP, has re-emerged as the leader in complete enterprise IT solutions while taking the enemy's ammunition as its own. How is HP supposed to compete with a company that says "if the situation is right, we recommend HP products" to its customers. HP spend more on research and development while IBM refocuses its research and development to other less competitive places (like the PowerPC chip). In addition, HP advertising becomes IBM advertising. Finally, by using open source and standards-based software, it can also claim infinite interoperability. Brilliant strategy, if you ask me.
"We are accountable for not only what we do, but also that which we don't do." -- Moliere