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IBM Promises $1B Investment In Linux Development
itwbennett writes with a link to a story you'll need to mentally upgrade from "expected to" to "just happened" about IBM's $1 billion dollar investment in Linux officially announced Tuesday morning at LinuxCon (the WSJ broke the story yesterday), by IBM VP Brad McCredie. IBM, says the linked article, will use all that money "to promote Linux development as it tries to adapt Power mainframes and servers to handle cloud and big data applications in distributed computing environments. The investment will fund Linux application development programs for IBM's Power servers and also be used to expand a cloud service where developers can write and test applications for Power servers before deployment. It will also facilitate software development around IBM's new Power8 chips, which will go into servers next year."
It's not the only time that IBM has recently tossed around the B-word, and as Nick Kolakowski notes at Slash BI, it's also not the first time IBM has put that much money into Linux.
Back to IBM !!
I just moved to FreeBSD.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
To sell more power chips. Nothing to see here, please move along.
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They had better be investing this money in kernel developer time, or in driver support dev time.
I'd hate to see this promise just go towards funding their own internal work.
Oh, nevermind, read their article. Guess I'm not surprised >_
I think they should spend their time (and ultimately money) on more intelligent installations, documentation, and that abomination of a support website.
The phrase '$1 Billion' gets people to sit up and notice.
But most of this work won't benefit the Linux community and software at large, at least directly. It will be ancillary improvements; where something gets re-written/improved/fixed due to issues on the POWER architecture that happen to benefit everyone else too. Hopefully these are many and useful.
Still, any investment shows that Linux is Serious Business.
I wonder if this is an accounting trick. Lay off all their developers, and then hire them back as contractors at a lower rate to sell Power8 systems.
$18 Billion in sales would seem to suggest otherwise.
Well, if you're in IBM-India, that's great!
IBM invest 1 Billion in linux 10 years ago? news.cnet.com/2100-1001-249750.html
As long as no one can just take their ball and go home BSD style, then EVERYONE benefits. That's equality.
The "bitch mentality" of sabotaging others is really not necessary or appropriate.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
OS/2 Warp flashback......
Hmm, well if one looks back at certain IBM projects, like the FAA upgrade, didn't they spend about a billion in today's dolalrs and came up with like nada, or nothing usable?
IBM works on the principle that it's better to hire 1,000 program managers with IQ's of 60 to manage 5,000 programmers of IQ 80, than to maybe hire five smart people. Sometimes works, often not so much.
The people at itworld are less IBM literate than the WSJ, because they keep repeating "POWER mainframe".
Repeat after me, POWER is _NOT_ IBM's mainframe line. The mainframe line is the zSeries and runs on proprietary processors clocked at 5.5Ghz. POWER processors are in the pSeries and iSeries machines.
Now, that said, in many ways the high end pSeries stuff is better than the mainframe hardware, but in no way is it considered "mainframe" grade to the IBM sales guys.
All that said, RHEL and SLES both run on pSeries and zSeries machines.
Umm.....not if all the development is in the ppc64 branch.
The last time IBM invested $1 billion in Linux, SCO began suing the entire world.
I hope part of that $1B will be used to buy Mr. Torvalds a license for a good backup program... ;)
Actually, there is an FOSS OS that harks back to OS/2 called osFree. Essentially, it's the L4 microkernel, on top of which sits the relevant 'personalities' that are to be supported, be it Presentation Manager or even win 32 or win16. If that project can get to the point where the Presentation Manager personality is binary compatible w/ OS/2 on x86, and source compatible w/ OS/2 on Power, it would be a great achievement.
If any of the other companies make Power based microprocessors, then someone could possibly do a BeBox like thing to support osFree on a Power based box.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I used to believe in IBM, but no more. In my mind, they are a trash company.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Hahaha. Just had to say it.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
Maybe IBM could develop an acceptable Integrated Development Environment then programmers wouldn't be so put off developing for Linux.
I don't want to start a flame war... But, Microsoft knows how to deliver a quality development environment... These days, I can't say much more positive about MS but their development environment is quite good. Now, if Linux could achieve the same level of quality with their development environment then Linux would have a real chance.
It would seem to me that in newer POWER iron, they could just install Linux, and for backwards compatibility, run AIX on KVM/Qemu. That would support any legacy software that they need to support, while they can work on getting as much Lintel software ported to Power Linux.
what the hell does this have to do with the king of the elephants?!
IBM has been rather secretive about their server chips lately, I would not at all be surprised if this move to ramp up server and work station software development is not rapidly followed with announcements of 64 bit low power chip designs with cache numbers that blow everybody else out of the water.
HP has bet the farm on low power Moonshot servers largely designed for clustered Linux applications. Interesting times ahead as HP and Dell are tied into and rely completely upon others for chips. IBM has spent heavily to avoid becoming another Intel bitch dog slave and just perhaps they are up to something revolutionary again.
INTERESTING times ahead!
This message was not sent from an iPhone because Peter Sellers really was a deviated prevert without a dime for the call
As I said yesterday in comments regarding the article about Linus falling out of the top 100 code contributors list ...
Linux is primarily developed by corporations or government entities, directly or through subsidies, and not the more romantic hobbyist developer contributing his/her personal time.
As long as no one can just take their ball and go home BSD style ...
Wrong. With BSD you can go but you have to leave your ball, you are free to get a new ball and keep it to yourself though. Nothing already contributed can be taken away, you just stop contributing. The BSD community does not lose a single line of code.
You've obviously never worked in the financial sector. We have pSeries servers alongside our z10 EC12 mainframe and other wintel servers that all work together to get the job done. Not everything can be done on a big x86-based cluster as effectively as it can on the setup most financial orgs have with a mixture.
The way I read the release is that IBM is going to hire people in France to support linux, while laying off people in the US doing AIX and Linux work.
There is also the gov't policy angle. The US gov't wants to tax foreign profits. So companies like Apple and IBM have a lot of money overseas that they don't know what to do with. Spending what they earn overseas in an overseas development effort avoids these additional taxes.
The US gov't basically seems to be encouraging IBM to shut down US development and move it overseas. Sure its an unintended consequence but many gov't failings stem from the unintended consequences of good intentioned policy.
If they use the remaining $99 million for advertising, it might actually work.
Have you tried turning it off and on again?
It's not as if any hobbyist "dumb kids" are working on ppc64.
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Agreed. I've used Linux for fifteen years and very rarely use anything else on hardware I own. One of the few things MS does better is their IDE. Visual Studio is excellent. Their programming languages may be excrement, but the IDE is excellent.
$1B for Linux on Power architecture? Are they just looking for a tax writeoff? Is it cheaper than updating AIX?
You'll likely benefit indirectly from this investment if you, say, have a bank account. Financial companies use pSeries and zLinux almost exclusively over distributed x86-based systems, so when you see an improvement in transaction times at the ATM you can send IBM a thank you card!
Will any of that $1B finally get IBM to port their COBOL compiler to Linux? People have asked for it since the 1990s, and IBM has steadfastly ignored them. Their compiler works on AIX and OS/2, so it should be fairly easy to port. Now, a COBOL parsing front-end that integrated into LLVM would be a dream come true. How much would it cost to take their AIX code's front-end and port it to LLVM?
Since when do Indian engineers work on Linux code? Isn't it developed by Linus' team - all IBM would have to do would be to handle the Power/POWER ports, as well as getting standard Linux software ported to the platform. Otherwise, the kernel comes from Linus, the userland from GNU (unless IBM chooses to put AIX userland on top of Linux), the X11/Wayland from X.org, KDE from the KDE guys & so on
and coming in under budget - kudos!
In fact the reason everyone loves .NET development is down to the IDE. I just had to write an admin tool in C#, and after a short time using it, it was clear the productivity gains from the IDE were huge
The language is a bit crappy all in all, but I wouldn't even consider it if it didn't have the autocomplete, intellisense, refactoring and codegen features, anyone without any knowledge of C# can write C# code using Visual Studio... which is not a huge endorsement, but it shows just how easy it is made to be.
Now I'm back to the back-end C++ system, and I am actually missing the helpfulness of the IDE. I can;t see why Microsoft couldn't have spent all that effort on the C# stuff on adding the same features to a proper language. I just hope someone else can manage it better. A C++ IDE on Linux that was as good to use as C# on Windows would make developers jump platform.
Grumble grumble mutter mutter bitch bitch... Back in the days of OS/2 it'd have been refreshing to see IBM put that much into its *own OS*. Today though, as a Linux user, it's a good thing.
Because of a mysterious Windows 7 crash that somehow corrupted some of the Visual Studio debugger files (along with a lot of other things -- ouch, funny what happens when windows runs out of virtual memory during the night while supposedly asleep -- whatever happened to hibernate anyway?) I've started using windbg. I think this may be MS's best program. Studio's kind of annoying in many ways.
without the > $15 Billion invested by corporations to keep the project afloat. Be grateful.
Depends on the nature of the development in the ppc64 branch. If it's in the core instead of the arch/dir, then you gain from it.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
You're presuming that $1Bln put into FreeBSD work is going to EVER be contributed back. That's NOT a foregone conclusion, perpenso.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
That's only $27 in decimal. Big whoop. What next? A free mouse pad for Linus?
So, who does this help and who does this hurt. Recent developments in Linux have left the traditional players flat-footed. Will this favor new players over Red Hat?
Linux on Power is very nice. Mostly what this means is that the /arch/powerpc and /arch/s390 directories are going to get more love (perhaps also the /arch/mips directory), but for most users using either arm or intel processors, this may not do a lot. I have a power processor in my PS3, and I wish it were as powerful as my old 1.8GHz Pentium IV, but its not. Its my only experience with power processors, but still valuable knowledge. When someone mentions "Power Processor" I get fond recollections of my Timex Sinclair 1000 from 1983. I don't want one as a server, but if IBM wants to sell them I suppose it can. It won't hurt having them tinker with the /arch/powerpc and /arch/s390 directories, so long as they don't mess with the /arch/x86_64 and /arch/x86 directories, I will be happy.
You're presuming that $1Bln put into FreeBSD work is going to EVER be contributed back. That's NOT a foregone conclusion, perpenso.
Like Google's modifications to Linux that are not contributed back because they are only used internally, not shipped to others, and are considered a trade secret by Google?
Didn't they do that some years ago already? And having an ad campaign where they spray-painted sidewalks (and was fined for the "graffiti").
/ The Arrow
"How lovely you are. So lovely in my straightjacket..." - Nny
It's about power consumption. These new Power8 chips may be clever but due to a shortfall of imagination and planning by Silicon Valley investors (and American corporations in general) in the latter part of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st... these things are pretty 'steampunk'.
Of every 100 chips coming off the assembly line, roughly 37 will be powered by coal, 30 from natural gas. There is no real future in this.
Only 7 chips will get their power from Hydroelectricity, a percent point we would never want or be able to increase since it disrupts ecosystems and watersheds way beyond anything renewable utopians would admit to.
Only 3 chips will be wind powered, at a federally subsidized cost usually double that of other sources, the actual power supplied by wind turbine equipment amortized over 40 years that actually lasts less than 10.
19 chips will be nuclear powered, the method that most befits their advanced nature and hefty real-world consumption needs. Unfortunately the number is declining as the light water reactor plants are retiring after 30 years of (practically) perfect service.
Not ONE of these hundred chips will be completely solar powered despite an obscene amount of research and development that completely ignores the fact that no practical land based solar solution will ever scale, or exist without natural gas plant hidden just over the ridge.
Long before these 100 Power8 chips reach the end of their practical lifespan, the cost of non-renewable energy sources will start to climb as the natural gas 'glut' tapers off and cost of extraction increases exponentially.
Only if IBM and other corporations come together for the purpose of creating a true revolution in Power, such as ensuring development of molten salt reactor designs within a reasonable time frame for grid electricity and industrial heat generation... might these $ billions help the human race in ways that can save us,
Otherwise these 100 Power8 chips might become interesting trinkets found in the silicon rich dust of a failed civilization, taken by nomadic peoples for use as jewelry and adornment.
Energy from Thorium
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lG1YjDdI_c8
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Those features and more are available in vim, if you care to learn how to use it and maybe install a plugin or two. I assume emacs can provide them as well. Linux also lets me have 10 code windows and a larger compiling window simultaneously visible on a dual 1920x1080 monitor setup.
I am glad IBM is investing more in to and contributing to the Linux kernel. This is what open source is all about, and a sign that Linux is still growing at a rapid pace to replace the old, archaic, and expensive software in the field today.