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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.
To sell more power chips. Nothing to see here, please move along.
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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!
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.
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.
I hope part of that $1B will be used to buy Mr. Torvalds a license for a good backup program... ;)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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?
AIX would have to be maintained, re-written & all that; w/ Linux, they have the standard kernel that they just pull from out there, whose Power port exists. Then they take that, then all the programs that they need running on top of it, be it BusyBox or GNU or whatever, and then things like KDE or GNUSTEP. The good thing is that IBM can stop having to maintain an in-house team of programmers skilled in an OS that has increasingly limited use, and instead leverage the popularity of Linux and get that whole ecosystem ported to the POWER platforms.
Time is significant. Linux was originally developed mainly by hobbyists. After awhile a few corporations started subsidizing development, first by donations of equipment, and later by actually hiring people to ensure that it would run on their hardware. The people they tended to hire were those who were already acknowledged as experienced and talented.
Currently there are still a few pure hobbyists, but most developers have commercial subsidy, or are employed by some corportion or other. (I'm including, e.g., Red Hat.) There are multiple reasons. One is that a greater proportion of currently developing programmers are less into systems work. Another is that the system has become significantly more complex. (Most of the low-hanging fruit has already been picked.) Etc.
OTOH, do note that new distros are still being created. But also note that they tend to be created by forking an existing popular distro. The system is currently too complex for one person, and probably for one team of people, to manage a complete general purpose distro, like Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat, or Suse. Slackware seems to be a counter example to this claim, but I don't know it well enough to know that it actually is.
Also, to be accepted as a kernel developer, you need to have a track record. And that takes time and effort. There are still some specialized areas that a person can use to break in (keeping documentation current is probably still such a place), but it's a lot more difficult than it used to be, because there are so many people submitting patches. It's much easier to do that if you have someone already accepted to vouch for you, and also to lead you through the process. And, as stated, most of those are currently people paid to work on the system as their job.
So, yes, it has developed into a system largely developed by people employed by corporations. And many of them are, indeed, the same people who started out doing this as a hobby.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
OTOH, do note that new distros are still being created. But also note that they tend to be created by forking an existing popular distro. The system is currently too complex for one person, and probably for one team of people, to manage a complete general purpose distro, like Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat, or Suse. Slackware seems to be a counter example to this claim, but I don't know it well enough to know that it actually is.
List of Linux distros
Looks like it breaks down by package manager as: Debian (apt), RPM-based (yum), Pacman-based, Gentoo (portage), Slackware. Then there are the handful of oddballs which are probably those without a package manager and require you to install everything from source?
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?