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IBM Grants Universal and Perpetual Access To IP
StonyandCher writes "IBM is making it easier to utilize its patented intellectual property to implement nearly 200 standards in the SOA, Web services, security and other spaces. Under a pledge issued by the company Wednesday, IBM is granting universal and perpetual access to intellectual property that might be necessary to implement standards designed to make software interoperable. IBM will not assert any patent rights to its technologies featured in these standards. The company believes its move in this space is the largest of its kind."
In most other industries and in fact in other parts of the IT industry you are mandated to do that as a part of the standards process. At the very least you have to guarantee that you will offer your IP on non-discriminatory terms.
It is entertaining to see SOA getting to its supposedly standard and uberinteroperable status without anyone paying attention to this minute IP detail. Entertaining, but not surprising. If you actually can read a SOA spec, comprehend it entirety and have some functioning brain cells left after that you are mad anyway. Every time I have to read Xpath or god forbid one of the WS security or addressing space specs I remember Dijkstra. He was absolutely right:
b> The problems of business administration in general and data base management in particular are much too difficult for people that think in IBMerese, compounded with sloppy English. Still right today. Just change data base management for interoperability and you got a description of WS/SOAP and the rest of that standard ilk.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Yes, because Open Source is the answer to everything!
How is it "logical" that IBM needs to open up their commercial products to entrench service standards? The standards should stand on their own. Open source products can embrace them regardless if commercial software remains closed.
I agree. It is a big enough step for a large IT corporation such as IBM to freely open up so much of their intellectual property. These standards can be used by open source applications now. That is what really matters when it comes to open source and this issue.
If you live in a country with no IP protection, your point of view might make some sense, but IBM still makes plenty of money on software, so going fully open-source is unlikely, even if you believe it's the right thing to do. I think no other company but perhaps Sun has done as much for Linux and open-source as IBM, at least if you discount the Linux distro publishers. For some reason, Big Blue seems to have decided to side with the public good rather than fear open-source as most corporations do. I don't fully understand how a monster company like IBM can act like this, while virtually every other huge corporation out there seems to be guided by Dilbert's boss.
I agree with the kudos! Let's hope Big Blue can keep on proving that large corporations don't have to be evil!
Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.
The standards should stand on their own. Open source products can embrace them regardless if commercial software remains closed.
The biggest and most commonly used 'product' to develop SOA-compliant applications is the JBoss stack - JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite, JEMS for short. It is open source, and uses the Rosetta ESB for building SOA apps.
Despite it's open source nature, RedHat is making a pile of money on JBoss - from training, certifications, consulting, site implementations etc. In fact RedHat makes over a billion dollars a year, based purely on Open Source offerings. Commercial success and Open Source offerings aren't mutually exclusive - if IBM really believes in the Open Source philosophy, they ought to make their offerings Open Source, else they risk dwindling mindshare.... and unltimately marketshare as well.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
This may be a bad thing, as the IP/patent system is becoming so broken that a fix will be required. But acts like this may prolong the status quo as supporters of the current system can point to this example and say "Look, the system balances itself." Personally, I wouldn't rely too much on the kindness of large corporations (or small ones).
-- Braden's law of data: All data spends some of its lifetime in an excel spreadsheet.
I'd go as far as saying that due to IBM's somewhat brave stance against the SCO bullshit, there might well of been no Linux had SCO decided to set up its case law on a less financial target.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
For some reason, Big Blue seems to have decided to side with the public good rather than fear open-source as most corporations do.
They're doing it because I'm guessing they're able to think big picture. IBM have been in existence for nearly 120 years now. The only way you get to last that long, especially while staying as big as they still are, is by being able to ride the rapids of consumer demand and desire.
They're still going to want to make money, of course...but they're smart enough to realise that a company doesn't really control either half of the supply and demand equation. The consumer declares their demand, and a company that wants to make money and last a long time supplies that demand, rather than trying to change or control what the consumer's demand is.
It is deeply appropriate that the animal most often associated with IBM is an elephant, I think. As well as being large, an elephant is a long lived and very intelligent animal. Also, although its' huge size means that things that shouldn't might get inadvertently stepped on occasionally, being herbivorous, an elephant is usually a fundamentally benevolent animal, as well.
Please how explain how open source automatically translates to "mindshare". I don't really see the link, but I'm interested in hearing your thoughts behind that assertion.
IMO, there are certainly advantages (as well as disadvantages) to being open source (depending on the project), but either way I think mindshare has a whole hell of a lot more to do with marketing than the open/closed nature of your product.
gameDB
So your position is that ultimately these companies need to completely open source all their current products, release all new products as F/OSS, and move over to the certification, consulting, and training for income model, or risk extinction? Companies have to be either entirely closed or entirely open? You can't mix-and-match based on market and product? I'll let IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft know they are ultimately doomed right away! F/OSS will overcome!
"The company believes its move in this space is the largest of its kind."
:)
If the definition of 'move' and 'space' mean that certain baseline/root information was made available in a manner that meant both easier access and freedom to use it, with the expectation that such a move would foster more information and more giving, etc. etc, I contend that when the printing press was unleashed, a much larger move occurred, in a similar place.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not chipping on IBM, but if you are doing good for goods' sake, then do it, but please try to leave out the part where you paint yourself up as all warm and fuzzy and giving
The river erodes the mountain a particle at a time.
You can come through with a tidal wave, if you want results by the next election, but there will be side effects.
Keep working at it, but mind the side-effects.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Please how explain how open source automatically translates to "mindshare". I don't really see the link, but I'm interested in hearing your thoughts behind that assertion.
I thought it was obvious. Why is Microsoft finding it difficult to retain "Devleopers, Developers and Developers"? Because their philosophy is Closed Source, and developers like to control their entire development environment - from the IDE to the compiler, to the authentication mechanism, the security model, the protocols, port numbers etc. Merely unencumbering a standard from patemts is only half the battle won - people will flock to an implementation of said standard that is patent unencumbered AND Open source at the same time.
Open sourcing a platform like Websphere or a collabarative suite like Lotus Notes will not be a commercial disaster, like the bloke who modded my original post 'Troll' seems to believe.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
The threat of patents is only one of many risks facing open source developers, if it wants a major market share, IBM should take more similar steps - that is my position. I would not advocate a similar approach to enemies of Open Source like Oracle and Microsoft - if more companies like IBM adopt the Open source approach, the rest will be forgotten in less than a decade.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
The conspiracy theorist in me wonders if this is the payback for the "User Product" language in part 6 of GPL3 ( http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html ) - which seems to be aimed at making GPL software cooptable for purely business purposes.
The more rational side of me observes that IBM probably sees itself writing the business logic side of the web services architecture in the future, and doesn't really care much who wrote the middleware so long as it just works. Letting people write middleware without fear of IP lawsuits would tend to facilitate this.
sigs are hazardous to your health
To make SOA and web services workable, governance is a neccessary evil allowing for SLA's to be 'stapled' to a service, especially true when the service gets a new version and breaks exisiting consuming applications ...
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BitTorrent has already been providing universal access to IP since 2001. Nice try, IBM!
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
They have a patent on interfacing Javelin.Tilt() with Landscape.Windmill
/me is glad to see this. It might mean better driver functionality for older IBMs and maybe some Lenovo machines.
You should probably read The Innovator's Dilemma.
Or maybe just read about the concepts presented in the book.
Money is the root of all evil?
Making standards easier to apply is always a good thing, but IMHO for a standard to make sense it's even more important to force people to actually implement it properly and in a conforming way. Which brings me to the licensing terms of Adobe's PDF stuff, which can be freely implemented as long as the implementation strictly follows the standard. In the same vein, it might have been a good idea to add a constraint to the license that makes the free use of IBM's IP only available to people who strictly adhere to the standard. Everybody else who thinks they have a good reason for adding their own "extensions" would have to fill out forms like it used to be and maybe have to make any documentation and patent portfolio regarding their changes freely available.
As a result, people would either have to follow the standard or at least provide documentation and patent licenses to guarantee some degree of interoperability, in order to prevent things like Microsoft's bastardization of Kerberos.
But I'm neither a patent lawyer nor do I have any special insight into licensing deals, so if this idea is stupid then please feel free to point out any potential issues you might see.
:/- spoon(_).
According to your link, he spend 17 years at Crocker National Bank and Pacific Bell (around 9 years each). They don't seem to have ever been part of Big Blue (at least according to their wiki pages), so thanks for the irrelevant link.
If this were really happening, what would you think?
put your IP where your mouth is and make "interoperability" a fact and not a PR campaign.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
How can a monster company like IBM act like this? It's not mostly out of altruism, although I am sure they have some. IBM invented FUD, as any old-time mainframer can tell you.
:p). Linux has a 5-10% desktop market share, and Apple has risen to 10% also. Google has 1/4 of the office suite market, and is competing very effectively with Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services for spam filtering, email archiving, and IM & web security.
Why, then, do they do it? The number one reason IBM supports open standards, supports open source, has opened its patents, and has contributed so much code to Linux is that IBM believes it can compete more effectively on a more level playing field. Compete against whom? Microsoft, mostly. When there is an entrenched de facto monopoly that fully dominates one area of your business (the dekstop) and is trying to muscle in on your turf (higher end servers, databases, web services, hosted services) and has already muscled in very successfully on your groupware turf, how do you fight back?
You try to level the playing field by commoditizing the thing your opponent sells. Microsoft is a software company; IBM sells a lot of software, but their primary business is hardware and services. If they can commoditize the software that runs on their hardware and on which they provide value-added services, it gives them a competitive advantage against software companies (and against hardware companies that don't use open source, too). The revenue stream of the software company goes down, while the revenue they make on service and on hardware sales increases as a result of reduced software costs.
While Sun also has some altruism (maybe more than IBM, because Sun's roots are in BSD; IBM's roots are firmly in proprietary software), I think it's a pretty good bet that the main reason for open-sourcing Solaris and Java is that they weren't making a lot of money on those things anyway (Solaris used to cost hundreds of dollars a copy, then it became essentially free as in beer) and Microsoft has done a pretty good job of fighting off Java on a lot of fronts, so if they open-source Java and Solaris they get:
-Commoditization pressure on Microsoft
-The same benefits of that pressure that IBM reaps, because like IBM, Sun is a hardware and consulting company that also sells software
-Probably more Java mindshare and marketshare
-Some respect from the FOSS community; what accountants call good will
-Linux might stop eating Solaris' lunch a little bit on the lower end of Sun's market
Why do they hope HP will do this too? Because of HP is the same kind of company Sun and IBM are, although HP is more purely a hardware play than either Sun or IBM. If they follow suit and start opening their patent portolio and maybe even open source HP/UX, that puts even more commoditization pressure on Microsoft. Of course, Sun, IBM, and HP all compete against each other - they're selling into the same markets - but each of them views Microsoft as more of a threat. If they all act to substantially level the playing field by opening up lots of their IP, that will make a significant counterweight to Microsoft's dominant position.
Fast forward five to ten years into the future and envision one possible scenario: the successor to Vista has just been released, or maybe hasn't even made it yet. Some places are still running XP. Linux has continued it's slow push onto the desktop and has pushed even farther into the server market. IBM, Sun, and HP all sell servers with either Linux or Solaris, AIX, or HP/UX. Same price either way; the lot have been open-sourced.
On the desktop side, Dell is still selling Linux machines, and they've been joined by Gateway, Lenovo, maybe even Sony (OK, that last one is crazy talk
Microsoft is still a formidable company, with a huge warchest of cash and a lot of highly successful product lines, but the combined weight of its competitors has not only checked its market share gains, but reversed a number of them.
Linux and Mac c
"How is it "logical" that IBM needs to open up their commercial products to entrench service standards? The standards should stand on their own. Open source products can embrace them regardless if commercial software remains closed."
It depends on your perspective.
On one hand, maintaining control over closed code creates a monopoly over the ability to *support* the product in question. While opensourcing the code creates competition in the support market.
So the question people should be asking relates to where you want the competition to be?
In other words, Redhat is successful because they support their product as well as or better than their competition, who also have access to the same source code as all other people who support the code. Microsoft, on the other hand, has the best support for their products, and all of the companies that support Microsoft products are reliant on Microsoft for technical information and patches. So there is limited competition in the market for support of Microsoft products, because support of Microsoft products, as a product, is controlled by Microsoft.
Just my opinion. The FOSS model is universally better.
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
For some reason, Big Blue seems to have decided to side with the public good rather than fear open-source as most corporations do
I don't think they are siding with the public good. More a case of enlightened self interest.
What's good for the industry is good for IBM. What's good for IBMs customers, is good for IBM.
Open standards make IT easier to implement and 'grow' the industry. If IBM is at the forefront of that movement, then they can grab a larger share of a large pie.
In addition to this, adopting opensource can lower their development costs. Witness the replacement of their own IBMHttpd server in Websphere with apache.
Therefore opensource and openstandards == more $$$ for IBM.
FTFA:
"IBM has provided a non-assertion statement that says people are free to use any of its patents needed to implement the standards, provided they do not sue IBM or anyone else over use of their own patents involved in implementing the standards." The important part is "provided they do not sue IBM or anyone else..." - think about it - MS get free use of IBM patents UNTIL they sue someone over the use of their patents cover the same technology (OOXML, anyone?). Then the jig is up, no more free ride. Its an economic incentive for MS to not sue. Nice job IBM!!!!
If you really think that then you are simply not paying attention. Oracle is very strongly getting behind open source as a platform to host it's applications both at the OS level and at the (java) application server level. Oracle makes it's money off of support rather than license fees (although those also cost an arm and a leg). So putting the Oracle RDBMS under the GPL would not be such a dire move for Oracle Corp as such a move would be for Microsoft.
There are also a number of key support pieces for the RDBMS that are supported as open source projects.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Sun is fickle. That's all there is to it.
As much as Sun might want to be our friend, it has the habit of changing it's mind far too frequently.
IBM doesn't have that problem. Generally you know where it stands and why.
Many of us have firsthand experience with the fruits of Sun's indecision.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Is this "pledge" a PR release, or is it legally binding?
If new management comes into power at IBM can they suddenly just decide to rescind the pledge and nail people for IP infringement and demand royalties?
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
"Because their philosophy is Closed Source, and developers like to control their entire development environment..."
Don't think so. I believe it's because MS produces crappy products, closed or otherwise. Open source is littered with the bodies of crappy products. Being open source, shouldn't they have garnered "mind share"?
"Open sourcing a platform like Websphere or a collabarative suite like Lotus Notes will not be a commercial disaster, like the bloke who modded my original post 'Troll' seems to believe."
Nor will not open sourcing them.
You can't take it back when it's an official statement like this. Any attempt to enforce
at this point will go down in flames as it was done deliberately and with intent. Witness
what happened with SCO v. IBM when SCO ran that line of thought up the flagpole. AT&T had
sent out a similarly natured release stating the actual licensing intent- which was NOT the
interpretation SCO was trying to run up the flagpole and try to see if the Court saluted it.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
After the divorce with Microsoft (post OS/2 debacle) IBM tried to regain control of PC OS and hardware. It consistently failed. The last real opportunity was : PPC + OS/2 as RISC based alternative to x86 + Windows (alliance with Apple and Motorola) : beaten by Intel P6 (hardware emulation of x86 on RISC).
When IBM took the Linux road, it was in part because it figured there was no chance of replacing the Microsoft monopoly with a renewed IBM monopoly. No allies to reach that goal, nobody interested. IBM wants to be the main 'integrated service provider', and now thinks it's interests are best served with one big 'level play field'. The Microsoft monopoly is the main obstacle to that 'level play field'. And Linux is the means to achieve it. IBM is very careful not to 'own' Linux : if it does, it would not be a 'level play field' anymore, and all other actors would cease to support it, and so it would be unable to beat Microsoft.
So : no 'good', no 'bad'; just a (sound) long term business plan. Which has the happy consequence, for us, of a heavyweight support for Linux.
Oracle is very strongly getting behind open source as a platform to host it's applications both at the OS level and at the (java) application server level. Oracle makes it's money off of support rather than license fees (although those also cost an arm and a leg).
Oracle going open source? Colour me shocked, then! DB2, MS-SQL and Oracle are the only major closed source database blokes out there... and Oracle is the biggest of the bunch.
Some Oracle chap tried to speak about "Free Software" offerings from Oracle in a conference in Belfast... he was shouted down and asked to describe it as 'cost-less' instead. Oracle will get behind Open Source AFTER Duke Nukem gets released, AFTER hell freezes over, AFTER Ballmer stops distributing chairs. Not anytime soon.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Open source is cutting off their oxygen supply. It's just a matter of time really. How much do you think the profitability of the SQL server product fell when they started offering a basic version for free?
evil is as evil does
So what might the benefits befor IBM? Well, IBM probably realizes that, unlike Microsoft, they are not is a position to shove proprietary formats and "standards" down people's throat. If they were to introduce "standards" with patent-protected components, then the industry would just simply develop alternative solutions, thereby creating new standards that IBM would most likely end up having to adopt eventually. Making their IP available is nothing more than IBM's attempt to get their own formats accepted as the de-facto standards in the industry, which gives IBM a nice head-start over everybody else.
So with this, and the PR they get over this move, it seems like IBM does gain quite a bit from this step. That doesn't mean it isn't a good move for all of us (it is), but there you go.
You gotta love it when you actually learn a lot from a reply. Thanks! I'm not so sure Linux is headed fast for the "Then you win" stage, unless we redefine "winning". If "winning" means that the big PC vendors all support Linux desktops, peripherals come with Linux drivers, and we no longer have to pay the Windows tax, then I think Linux is headed for a win. If "winning" means becoming the single most popular desktop OS, I doubt Linux will ever win. But why should I care what Joe Sixpack has installed?
Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.
In fact RedHat makes over a billion dollars a year, based purely on Open Source offerings.
That's nice and all, but a billion dollars is a small deal for IBM. Given their positions today, comparing IBM and RedHat's business models is amusing bar talk at best. Services are a low margin business and software sales are a high margin business. If there's no legal or strategic reason, and people are buying the product, there's no business reason to open source software. RedHat lives on an open source model because they legally have to.
As a child of I've Been Moved, I just have to say how nice this is. IBM is a wonderful company with a grand history. Like all successful companies, they have had their bad days. This is a great day for them.
Probably the best read on the subject right here: http://cafe.elharo.com/xml/north-and-south/
Very simple. When MS, Sun, HP, Dell, whoever the hell else goes the way of the dodo IBM will still be there. IBM got huge, abused their power, others caught up, IBM being a rather old company that has spanned many generations of technology has learned how to survive the march of technology.
This is one of those things I fail to understand about modern American business. Everyone is so concerned with the immediate right here right now next quarter earnings infinite growth model. It is stupid at best, it leads to all kinds of scandal, and otherwise destroys a company. Arthur Anderson (the enron accountants) started with "Our loyalties are to the auditors not to our customers" and they got freaking huge...good business is far more profitable in the long run...they cook some books and the entire company gets disolved. IBM isn't actually the only one to have figured this out, just the only one geeks usually talk about. Warren Buffets stuff tends to behave this way as well. He talks like the whole thing is a game, its not about getting rich to him, so much as he likes the economic game and $ is how you keep score. He has done a ton to help others get into the game as well rather than shutting the little guy out (now, it still requires the motivation and the risk taking to play, but its not his job to give everyone gobs of cash)
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
What a cogent, informative post. Very nicely done!
WebSphere might be salvageable by stripping out some of those proprietary add-ons. Lotus Notes however would have 0 developers.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Ouch.
I must admit I was working from memory and I didn't check my own sources. Not sure where I got it from, a google search only gets a few dozen hits.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
This is the most significant development I've seen in IP practice for years. This is the largest of the corporate entities saying that IP-sharing is a good idea; they don't go full FOSS because that has them making costly products and giving them away for free, which doesn't work under capitalism. But they're approving the idea, and that will inspire others to follow their line of thinking.
technical writing / development
Why not just let the patent's slip then into the public domain? It costs a good bit, almost doubling each year that you renew a patent. So if they're allowing universal access the patents are then pretty much public domain except they can still say they are the owners. Sounds like they virtually GPL'd their patents :)
Back in the mid nineties, Big Blue was having some extremely big blues. They were laying people off left, right and center and their stock lost more than half it's value. Basically, they were going down the tubes.
At that point they reinvented themselves as a service organization. Now almost everything they do is geared towards service. Even if they sell a product, they are doing it in order to sell a service. That's one of the reasons they got out of the PC business.
IMHO, one of their biggest successes was in their mainframe group. Instead of trying to sell people mainframes, they decided to try to help people save money in their server farms with virtualized linux clients on a mainframe. Yes, they sold mainframes. But the focus was subtly changed -- they were selling solutions to problems, not products.
Other big companies (notably MS) are just now starting to realize that the big money is *not* in retail. The vast amount of software being written is in house development. You think there's money in operating systems? It doesn't even begin to compare to the amount of money being spent on custom development. Not only that, but retail channels are extremely expensive to set up (and keep set up). In fact, you sometimes have to *pay* people to take your product (which you hope you will make back on "upgrades").
IBM realized quite early on that they can make a lot more money selling solutions into enterprise business than they could selling shrink-wrapped software. And this is where open source software comes in. It may appear that open source software hurts your ability to compete (you give your competitors the same software you have). But in reality, the benefits always go to the maintainer -- especially if the maintainer is big and trusted.
An excellent example of this is Rational. These guys work on Eclipse. But they don't have to sell Eclipse, because Rational sells RUP -- a process. They go into your big, top heavy, traditional enterprise company and promise to "fix" your software development process. They get paid absolute crap-loads of money to do this. The marketing spin is that you get a real, honest-to-god, "doin' it right" process *and* a whole bunch of tools that (thanks to their open source nature) comprise the most popular IDE on the planet (even more popular than Visual Studio apparantly).
Compare that to MS and Visual Studio. The only people who actually buy this thing are individuals and small businesses. There is absolutely no way on earth that MS makes *any* money from it. Instead they use it as a tool for vendor lock-in. You become a MS-partner and you get "free" copies of MSDN (which includes visual studio). Very little money changes hands. In exchange for your "free" copies, you agree to do things the way MS wants you to -- so they can maintain their monopoly on the OS.
So on the one hand, IBM makes oodles and oodles of money. And on the other MS entrenches their monopoly position with their OS. Gee... in the long run, who is going to do better I wonder?
Make no mistake -- IBM is not on the side of good here. They are in it to make money. It just so happens that open source development suits their method of making money. I personally believe that almost all software development will eventually go this route. There's just too much money out there. And as far as I'm concerned, it's a good thing.
The one thing I really can't understand is why SAP doesn't jump into the fray. If someone wanted to make oodles and oodles of money, I think that undercutting them with a similar open source product, and again selling it as "process improvement" would work really well. All you would need would be a large accounting firm to front you...
Their free offering is like the pirated copies of Photoshop. It's there to get users who could never buy their products become familiar with it. The big guys didn't drop the commercial version for the free one and when the small shops become big ones, they'll hopefully move to the expensive offering.
No. Read software patents. Software patents cover the trivial aspects. A mars landing is complicated, rocket science, but it is easy to describe the process as it is done in patent writings: rocket device equipped With oxygen supply unit magically sent to Moon, interaction between the fuel supply unit associated with the engine device, not to forget a rocket engine steering unit.. Is a mars landing trivial. No. But a patent on a mars landing would cover all the stuff you know when I say "Mars landing". http://eupat.ffii.org/analysis/trivial/index.en.ht ml
So it is OK for IBM to keep their important apps proprietary and still be praised for being "friends" of FOSS?
Sure, unless you're Stallman or a Stallman disciple who think that all proprietary software is evil by nature and should be
eradicated from the face of the Earth. And even then, there's no good reason to not praise the contributions IBM have made to the F/L/OSS world, despite whatever objections you may have to their proprietary offerings.
When they open source DB2, Lotus Notes, AIX may be I will take them seriously otherwise they are no different from Microsoft and Oracle.
Except IBM have contributed thousands - if not millions - of lines of code, and hundreds of patents to the F/L/OSS world, unlike Microsoft or Oracle?
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
(IANAL)
"Make no mistake -- IBM is not on the side of good here."
It appears that IBM, amongst other companies, has found a way to make money _while_ doing good, which is better than being just one of those two properties.
Let me put it plainly -- if I had the pure skills to implement the full stack which underpin IBM's web-related solutions at an extremely high level, I would be making well into the six digits in terms of income (in USD), and IBM's markup on me would push the cost to client companies to around double or triple that amount. Multiple "me" by around ten thousand bodies or more and you can see how it makes sense for IBM to be on the forefront of interoperability technology because that is where the $$ is at.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
And that could happen before Duke Nukem Forever.
Yes. That's a good way of putting it. And there's nothing wrong with making money. So the current situation is ideal. But I guess my point is that just because someone does something good doesn't mean that they are oriented towards doing good things.
:-)
Or to be more specific, just because IBM is in the business of writing and supporting open source software, does not mean that they are wed to the idea. A good contrast is RedHat whose entire business is built around free software. They have a corporate mandate (or did at one point) not to engage in proprietary software. So they have chosen a side. IBM has not.
On reflection, my choice of nomenclature (i.e., "good") was really poor. I have a friend that constantly warns me of the dangers of bipolarizing the situation (especially using terms like "good" or "evil"). In reality, I believe that IBM has a better business plan than RedHat. Their open source business operates in a way that I think is more likely to succeed. However I agree more with RedHat's stance.
The choices that IBM has made lately are encouraging and I hope at some point that the vast majority of their business is open source (or ideally free) software. In a perfect world, they would share RedHat's stance of being free software only. But they aren't there yet, and that's all I was referring to.
But thanks for calling me out on that statement. It made me think
It's merely an attempt to tranquilize the angry mobs, of which I'm a proud member, who want to see the abolishment of patents and copyright. They(IBM) are very afraid that their vast portfolio would turn into a useful pile of paper merely taking up space. Microsoft doesn't seem so worried about it.
What?
>In fact RedHat makes over a billion dollars a year,
Just fyi but, Red Hat's trailing 12 month revenue is about $400M.
>else they risk dwindling mindshare.... and unltimately marketshare as well.
I've been keeping track of WebSphere's public growth figures. The WebSphere division competes vs. the JBoss product set. I think you'll agree that our growth has been well above the market and growing at such a rate from a base of several hundreds of millions is much more difficult than growing from a much smaller revenue base.
I do work at IBM (in the WebSphere division), so maybe I'm biased, but the financial results are difficult to argue with.
What do you mean enhance them without fear? There are many applications built on Notes/Domino/Websphere, and at least in the Domino+Notes space I know there are many Applications which enhance the application. (Teamstudio /YTria for example).
Opening the patents actually allows other companies to build competing applications without having to pay IBM tax.
My definition of winning is pretty much in line with yours, that Linux will be a first-tier OS alonside Windows with a lot of hardware manufacturers and PC vendors, although I wouldn't count it as impossible that it might at some future point hit the second definition: having a desktop market share >= Windows. While there is still room for improvement in a number of areas, in a number of other areas Linux is already *better* than Windows as a desktop OS. KDE in particular (of course, some of you may say Gnome ) is mostly better than the Windows UI. Vista? Kubuntu, in particular, has done some neat things. Since I got a Mac this year, I know where they got those ideas :-)
:)
The biggest area to be worked on now, IMO is UI consistency. For example, on my Mac, to get to the preferences in *any* application I know that I can hit Cmd-comma. That level of consistency is typical. In my experience, Windows doesn't reach this level, and Linux desktops are even farther away from it. Macs aren't perfect - I have my own little list of UI annoyances - but 6 months after getting this Mac, I continue to be impressed by the level of UI consistency and attention to detail. It's really something. That's the bar that KDE and Gnome need to jump for: to have a UI as good as Apple's in terms of polish and consistency.
I have a Windows machine at home that is pretty used for one purpose only: to use voice/video in Yahoo Messenger to keep in touch with far-flung family members who all use it. At either home or work, I have machines running Linux, OS X, FreeBSD, Solaris, and XP. Of those five, Windows is the only one that will send both my attitude and my language into the toilet in minutes. It feels like a total kludge in comparison to both KDE and OS X. Looked at that way, I don't find the idea that Linux could someday hold either a majority desktop market share, or at least the largest single slice, to be beyond the realm of possibility. After all, we all know people who use Windows and only Windows, and hate it. They stick to it like a person in a dysfunctional relationship might cling to an abusive boyfriend/girlfriend, but sooner or later they'll buck up their courage and look around, and they'll see that there's someone better out there and that relationships aren't supposed to be that way.
It's already the case for most people that "Once you go Mac, you never go back." The day when it also becomes "Once you go Tux, Windows is out of luck" isn't so far off either, maybe
Would you think if you were a plant?
Obviously, I have no proof to back this up, but I can certainly assume that Microsoft could be far more aggressive against open source if they wanted to be.
-Red
Guns don't kill people, "with glowing hearts" kills people.
You raise some good points but I think the "dwindling mindshare" and "marketshare" is a reach.
It is true that if you open source a product so that anyone can download it and try it out you remove barriers which will probably increase your market penetration. But a free trial of proprietary code can do much the same, giving people the chance to test drive before committing to a monetary investment.
Don't get me wrong. I prefer the open source business model. It feels friendlier and makes me feel that the product is going to be there for me unlike some proprietary products that went away after the company that produced them went out of business or just lost interest in supporting them any longer. But I don't look at the proprietary business model with distain either. Give me choices and I'll choose what works for me.
Opening your source is a very cheap way to advertise. You don't lose anything and the work and cost involved is minimal usually (unless your code includes lots of licensed code from others). For IBM it probably doesn't matter but for small companies it can be significant to have such a cheap means of advertisement.
Even if I know about a proprietary program I could use I'll make every effort to avoid it unless it's open source. I experience major issues almost daily with proprietary software and I have no desire to add to my list of woes. The worst is that when you get into expensive business applications the vendors often won't tell you basic things about how to use and manage the software because they want to sell you expensive support services, training, and upgrades. At least with the source code it'd be possible to figure things out, fix bugs, and produce our own add-ons without extensive to reverse engineering.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Very interesting read! I do see a growing movement towards commoditization of software development as a result of open source software. In that respect, I totally agree with you. However, I don't think that this will necessarily result in hurting Microsoft. Two reasons:
1) Parts of software applications are much more conducive to commoditization whereas the other parts still need much cognitive abilities. I believe companies like Microsoft will learn to take advantage of the commoditization and will be able to produce software more inexpensively. (please see my blog at http://www.swstrategies.com/blog/?p=5)
2) No doubt that the prominence of software running on personal computers (read XP, Vista, Office, etc.) is diminishing, and we will see many more web based applications. But I can not believe that Microsoft is unaware of this fact. I bet Microsoft is already positioning itself towards being a major provider for these we applications.
In near future, I do believe that Microsoft will not be the only 500 pounds gorilla in the field, but it will still be a power to reckon with.
// shachin
http://www.swstrategies.com/blog
Dont wory about it. I know I've been sure of something wrong before a few times.
If this were really happening, what would you think?
I believe it is insightful.
Because discussion of ideas is what advance knowledge.
Closing the source advances nobody but the software manufacturer, and in many situations, not even they benefit from this kind of licensing.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.