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IBM Promises $1B Investment In Linux Development

Posted by timothy on from the donate-I-mean-invest dept.

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.

6 of 109 comments (clear)

  1. Does it cost them anything? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  2. Re:Who Cares? by Minwee · · Score: 4, Informative

    $18 Billion in sales would seem to suggest otherwise.

  3. Wow! by LifesABeach · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Well, if you're in IBM-India, that's great!

  4. Re:Suckers by jedidiah · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  5. itword vs WSJ by bored · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  6. Linus by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    I hope part of that $1B will be used to buy Mr. Torvalds a license for a good backup program... ;)