IBM lost the OS wars, so selling OS's became a minor part of IBM's business. Sure, there is still a niche market for AIX, but it is pennies for an outfit like IBM.
So, IBM had nothing to lose if it jumped on the Linux bandwagon. In fact, it has been a boon because they've been able to market one OS for their entire server range from the i386s, to the PPCs to the mainframes. And they've been able to pitch a single unified vision around Linux, in particular, IBM hardware running Linux, Apache, and WebSphere.
Also, IBM has understood that the commodity OS market is not the place to be, rather they have a very profitable consulting division (IBM Global Services) that loses nothing and gains everything by promoting Linux.
All in all, hitching its fortunes to Linux has been a very, very smart move on IBM's part. The alternative might have been to end up like Sun!
Riiiiiight. Nice paranoia there. Exactly how is hurting Linux in the best interest of Sun?
Oh, come on! Sun's business model is stuffed. Sun is haemorraghing cash. Sun's flagship product, Solaris, is good, but it's expensive. Why run Solaris, when for most tasks, Linux is just as good, costs less and runs on cheaper, commodity, Intel hardware?
Linux is destroying Unix sales and of all the Unix vendors Sun has the most to lose. They had originally tried putting Linux in the low-end niche, which is why the bought Cobalt. But that hasn't worked and more and more companies are moving their high-cost Solaris servers to low-cost Linux ones. Sun has much to gain if SCO win.
Stable isn't just stable - it's a synonym for obsolete. For a server install an old install may in fact be a good idea - often rock-solid reliability is by far the most important criteria. But for a desktop, running "stable" means that my desktop applications can't read/write the document formats that more modern versions
So run testing on a desktop. Testing is fine for most desktop production uses. On my testing/unstable box, I've had no problems.
The journalists must have been desperate to write about something. They either took the obvious like Windows 9x (of course Windows 9x is dying out since Micro$oft isn't supporting it any more) and dot matrix printers (well, duh!), or the plain wrong, like client-server computing.
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What changed, specifically?
IBM lost the OS wars, so selling OS's became a minor part of IBM's business. Sure, there is still a niche market for AIX, but it is pennies for an outfit like IBM.
So, IBM had nothing to lose if it jumped on the Linux bandwagon. In fact, it has been a boon because they've been able to market one OS for their entire server range from the i386s, to the PPCs to the mainframes. And they've been able to pitch a single unified vision around Linux, in particular, IBM hardware running Linux, Apache, and WebSphere.
Also, IBM has understood that the commodity OS market is not the place to be, rather they have a very profitable consulting division (IBM Global Services) that loses nothing and gains everything by promoting Linux.
All in all, hitching its fortunes to Linux has been a very, very smart move on IBM's part. The alternative might have been to end up like Sun!
Oh, come on! Sun's business model is stuffed. Sun is haemorraghing cash. Sun's flagship product, Solaris, is good, but it's expensive. Why run Solaris, when for most tasks, Linux is just as good, costs less and runs on cheaper, commodity, Intel hardware?
Linux is destroying Unix sales and of all the Unix vendors Sun has the most to lose. They had originally tried putting Linux in the low-end niche, which is why the bought Cobalt. But that hasn't worked and more and more companies are moving their high-cost Solaris servers to low-cost Linux ones. Sun has much to gain if SCO win.
So run testing on a desktop. Testing is fine for most desktop production uses. On my testing/unstable box, I've had no problems.
The journalists must have been desperate to write about something. They either took the obvious like Windows 9x (of course Windows 9x is dying out since Micro$oft isn't supporting it any more) and dot matrix printers (well, duh!), or the plain wrong, like client-server computing.
Computerworld? Give it a miss!