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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?"
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...
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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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
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.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
... 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
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.
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.
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
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