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IBM Promotes Linux Partners to Highest Tier
Anonymous Anonmenon writes "Big Blue was at it again today after it promoted the two leading commercial Linux distributions to the highest level tier of its Strategic Alliance Program. From the article: '[The Strategic Alliance Program] is designed to allow independent software vendors (ISV) work through one point of contact within IBM as opposed to navigating through several relationships with representatives from different divisions. The move was billed by executives from all companies as a means to make it simpler for clients to acquire open standards-based Linux hardware, software, and services through integrated sales, distribution and services channels.' The announcement was also heavy on the Java side, with both Red Hat and Novell pledging a 'reinforced commitment' to the Java developer community and J2EE."
IBM has been a good friend to those parts of the open source community that fit its overall strategy. However, the emphasis on Java shows the importance it places on trying to protect its WebSphere revenue.
You can type check at compile time with a utility called pychecker. It works very well. So, you can have the advantages of dynamic typing with the safety of static typing by taking this step. The best thing is to automate it, so it runs with your unit tests.
Tell your "friend" (if he is real) to visit this intranet URL (https://lifeboat.ibm.com/lifeboat/stats/lifeboat/ stathome.php) for the latest statistics on Linux (6792 since April 2004) and Windows (867 since April 2004) installations inside the company. Keep in mind that this site only counts installs of the "official" IBM client images (both of which are installed via a custom made Debian boot cd, btw). Before April 2004, there were many thousands more installs of the older Linux image. And all this was before the availability of a Linux native version of Notes (which has just come out internally, non-IBMers wont be seeing it for a few more months though) and sametime! For Windows, most people use the IBM client image that was installed when they got their machine. And for Linux, many people (like me, for example) replace Windows with a free version of Linux like Debian, Ubuntu or Fedora. If you friends inside IBM have never seen a Linux box inside IBM, then they are either lying or are blind.
One thing that is not advertised as heavily as our gradual migration to Linux is our much quicker migration to Firefox. It is the IBM standard browser and most of the people I work with day to day use only Firefox, whether they use Linux, Windows or even OS X. There is (last I checked) only a single intranet site that still requires IE, and according to their notes, they will be supporting Firefox by the end of the year.