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IBM VP Talks About Another $1 Billion for Linux Development (Video)
Brad McCredie is an IBM VP, and head of IBM's Power Systems development. (He's also one of the mere few hundred IBM Fellows that have been named in the past 50 years.) He pointed out in his keynote at this year's LinuxCon gathering that IBM has been adopting and supporting Linux (and associated software, like Apache) in various ways for the past decade and a half. Famously, the company promised to support Linux to the tune of a billion dollars in 2001, and McCredie renewed the promise on Tuesday. I sat down to talk with him about just how they'll go about spending the next billion dollars on Linux development; when a company has more than $200 billion in market capitalization, there are lots of ways to spread it around. Spending on hardware is one way, and McCredie also talked about the recently announced OpenPower consortium, which ties directly into the ongoing Linux push.
A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money.
IBM gonna make it rain all over GNU!
IBM should use that 1 billion to offer better hardware support and "desktop" linux, moving marketshare into linux is sure to be the best investment if you can gain marketshare which you wont without desktop linux
A lot of it's going to be spent in France, which is famous for non-cheap labor ... (And on things like Watson, which has teams in New York, Austin, and India at least -- I think in some other places, too.)
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
You get what you pay for doesn't apply here at all. First of all, code needs to get accepted into the kernel. If you knew how that works, then you would know that garbage isn't getting into it. The people will have to be highly skilled and know their stuff. Even if they spend ten billion on "cheap labor" then there won't be a single line of code that actually makes it into the kernel.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
The way data centers are going, the "operating system" is migrating off the server farm. The trend is toward servers with a minimal OS that run a single application, probably in a VM. File systems are on other machines on a storage area network. Control of the server farm is on machines separate from the servers. Control machines tell server VMs what to run, what they can connect to (part of "software defined networking"), and their identity for security purposes. Logging, monitoring, and problem reporting is handled by machines other than the workers. Development takes place in a different environment than production. That's what Amazon AWS is like right now. That's what IBM needs to provide to their corporate customers.
Data center computing may not need Linux at all on the production machines. The more specialized machines which run the support systems of the cloud may use it, but they aren't the performance-critical machines. They're the security-critical machines. What we may need is a high-security OS for cloud support machines, accepting some loss in performance.