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The OS Community Embraces IBM
Joel Dutt writes "IBM... 'the corporation known as Big Blue has seen its reputation in the global open-source community shift from suspect sugar daddy to knight in shining armor.' Newsweek has an interesting article in its latest issue, discussing the relationship between the open-source community and the corporate giant."
Sure, they make hardware and sure, they sell software. However, they have legions of consultants that make money providing SERVICE to their clientele. Supporting software and tools that are both inexpensive/free and easily (freely?) maintained only helps their consulting business which is probably where their highest margins are. You have to sell LOTS of computers and peripherals to make the same profit you make by parking a dozen consultants at a customer location for 6 months.
Cheers,
How is this offtopic? OpenDX is open source software based on IBM code. If the mods had bothered to follow the link, they would have seen that.
Software is an overhead for IBM.
;)
Interesting: 'shrinkwrap' software is becoming a commodity, while 'custom' (integration, customer/vertical-specific software) software will remain high-margin. Services (or at least a large and profitable part of 'services') is just another name for custom software, which requires smart, creative people and provides higher margins than commodityware.
I don't think IBM will get out of the overall 'software' business anytime soon, though they will probably get out of the commodity software business soon, while continuing to contribute to the open commodity codebase. Who knows? Sponsor an army of Indian codemonkeys to improve the commodity base and let American coders (who are nearby and can do f2f/onsite more efficiently) handle the high-margin stuff...
(restating the obvious of course
the final solution was finalized in 1942 at the Wanssee conference. The man who devised the plan was Reinhardt Heydrich. He was at the time #3 in the Nazi party, a fanatical hitler supporter, a deputy reichsfuhrer, and in charge of bohmeia and moravia (sudetenland). He was later killed by czech resistance members who flew in from england. he was killed by a bomb on a corner in prague. hitler responded by razing the city of lidice (http://www.lidice-memorial.cz/index_uk.htm).
as for pencil/paper accounting, yes, it can and was done. keep in mind german fanaticalness regarding order. it was possible also because most of the prisoners went into ghettos, then later, to a final camp. (sorry to be so objective and analytical). the records were kept at each place. the germans checked in and checked out everyone who came and went. it wasn't like they let them leave or anything. now, did the nazis use ibm adding machines and stuff. hell, at that time, who wasn't?
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
I think they're more likely to oppose HP because of their history of _not_ supporting linux printer drivers, _not_ having most laptops work with Linux, and _not_ supporting Bruce Perens.
Eric Raymond words it better than I so I'll quote what he told carly:
"You've talked the talk. Now, can you walk the walk?"...
He criticized HP for holding on to the source code for its printer drivers, and for not releasing printer interface specifications, thus hindering development of drivers ported to other operating systems, namely Linux and the BSDs.
Not only that, but he asked HP either to kill its HP-UX operating system and replace it with Linux, or just Open Source the Unix splinter. He finished up the letter with this warning: "You'll also find that we're rather cynical about ringing endorsements; we've heard those before without result, and they won't earn you a lot of cred by themselves without actions and commitments that back them up."
I'll be convinced IBM contributes as much as Sun to OSS when I see that IBM has GPLed AIX like Sun will GPL Solaris...
Funny, the latest I've heard was that Sun still isn't saying what license they plan to use for Solaris. Do you have a link to an article where Sun claims they will use the GPL? All I've heard from them is that they want to "take the model with Java and bring it to Solaris."
Personally, as a Linux user, I'm much interested in IBM's real contributions to the Linux kernel. Their intent is to make Linux capable of replacing AIX eventually.
I'm not just talking about mainframe and POWER ports, as an anonymous coward above suggested, either. Of course, we all know about JFS, NUMA, SMP scalability, and EVMS (the last of which wasn't accepted, in the end). IBM has also contributed work on ext2/3, IA-64, PCI hotplug, udev, USB, and a number of other projects.
How many office solutions do we need? How about a huge software development solution like Eclipse, instead?
How about donating code to projects like Mozilla, Samba, and of course Apache (and more Apache)?
Finally, let's not forget that it's IBM that is paying the legal bills that will prove that Linux is free of whatever UNIX intellectual property may still exist, while Sun has been pumping funds into SCO's war chest.
That said, HP printers have always WorkedForMe (and for linuxprinting
on top of that:
god, this sounds like i work for/love them - Neither's true, I just think they aren't the worst by any means, and that's all I was trying to point out with my first post
http://milkshake.dexy.org
In case you haven't really noticed, IBM's big thing (except for a small abbaration known as the PC *wink*) has never been PCs, but large-scale systems, like the zSeries today. And large server class systems have never been and will never be "point-and-click" easy. In addition, just about every large corporate buyer, likes support contracts. If something seriously borks, you can expect IBM to fix it ASAP. The closest analogy a support contract can be made to (for an organization with an already well-seasoned IT staff) is insurance, because when your company is loosing $10,000/hr on a borked computer, you better damn well make sure you have every resource available to keep downtime to a minimum.
I wish I could write clever and witty sigs.