Memo Confirms IBM Move To Linux Desktop? 881
m5shiv writes "The Inquirer is reporting on an allegedly leaked internal memo from IBM CIO Bob Greenberg discussing IBM's move to a Linux desktop: 'Our chairman has challenged the IT organization, and indeed all of IBM, to move to a Linux based desktop before the end of 2005. This means replacing productivity, web access and viewing tools with open standards based equivalents.' The enemy of my enemy is my friend?"
Lotus Notes already runs on Linux (Score:5, Informative)
An IBMer's perspective (Score:5, Informative)
However, many groups use applications that cannot be replaced on Linux. My group, for instance, does nearly all of our work in Visio. I've looked at Kivio and others, and I can't begin to tell you how primitive they are. Also, at least my group does a lot of active development in Visual Basic to automate Visio and other programs.
Essentially what I'm saying is many basic users here may be able to move to Linux, but Windows will remain the primary client for the forseeable future, simply for the applications, integration, and relative ease of working with partners who use Windows.
Re:Hmm ... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Still needs more 3rd party support (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Now is the time (Score:2, Informative)
The pull of developing and using a standard configuration can be huge.
Now .. the question is .. is this a bad thing?
Re:Too bad they didn't do that with OS/2... (Score:5, Informative)
The hardware of the time was woefully underpowered for the job. A high-end desktop in the early '90s had maybe 8 MB of RAM. Try running OS/2 2.0, CM/2 (the SNA protocol stack), and Win-OS/2 (Windows 3.0 hacked to run in a DOS session). Win-OS/2 was a requirement, because the 16-bit Windows applications of the time were vastly better than their 32-bit OS/2 counterparts when the latter even existed.
Re:This is about dog food (Score:1, Informative)
Re:winder if a new DE will come out of this (Score:2, Informative)
If somebody came along and made a lightweight, dynamic windowing system and desktop environment for Linux, with real usability and minimalism, I'd shit my pants!
May I suggest Windowmaker [windowmaker.org]? Please post pictures of your feces-encrusted jeans by 12:00 GMT tommorrow.
Re:Zero chance of this (Score:2, Informative)
You've got to remember, necessity is the mother of invention.. and just about all popular and widely accepted software projects exist out of the want for something better or more custom fit to your needs.
Think about how meticulous the true geek crowd is (not the wannabe's). You force a large group of technically inclined people to use something that just doesn't settle with them right and who knows what happens in the "off-hours". Before long you have a movement for a new DE and a strongly supported project =]
Well that's me day dreaming anyway
Re:IBM in support of Linux Desktop (Score:2, Informative)
http://eclipse.org/ [eclipse.org]
Re:But? (Score:1, Informative)
Ask Google [google.com].
Awesome, but what about Notes? (Score:5, Informative)
I work at IBM, and Linux is the only OS I use. It's a little rough in some spots, but ultimately workable. For me, the combo is:
SameTime (The Lotus Messenger) => Sanity (a Perl based clone)
Notes R5 => Notes R5 under CrossOver Office
MS Office => MS Office under CrossOver Office (when needed)
If Linux were the official desktop, that would be awesome.
Note: While I work at IBM, I'm not in any of the areas which decide these issues, and have no information is support or refutation of the rumors in the report. (But I can dream...)
Re:Too bad they didn't do that with OS/2... (Score:3, Informative)
I ran a multi-node BBS on a 486 DX2/66 with 12 megs of ram for at least 2 years. I was able to run Wordperfect 6.0 in a seamless session and two dos sessions simultaneously all the time on that machine. It ran just fine.
Re:Access (Score:3, Informative)
> format fits that bill besides
I think you mean 'If you're using MS Office'. OO.o runs on Windows fine.
Re:Not always a good thing (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Business Apps are what it's all about! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Since when has IBM been the enemy? (Score:5, Informative)
According to most of the books I've read concerning the history of the computer industry, it happened something like this:
The IBM PC was hurriedly slapped together with off-the-shelf parts because IBM wanted a piece of the burgeoning personal computer market, which was then practically owned by Apple. IBM knew that if they went through their normal development cycle and did everything in-house, the product would have been hopelessly late to market. So they assembled a team of people and told them to basically circumvent the normal IBM Way of Doing Things, and did so by buying almost every component they needed from outside vendors, including the OS, which came from a relatively small company called Microsoft (perhaps you've heard of them?). The only truly proprietary part of the PC was the BIOS.
Anyway, IBM went ahead with the PC because they thought that the proprietary BIOS would prevent anyone from duplicating the PC without getting trampled by IBM's lawyers. They also thought that the volume discount component prices they were getting could not be matched by any ragtag startup company. Compaq proved them wrong, first by reverse-engineering the BIOS and then producing an IBM PC clone profitably.
Phoenix also reverse-engineered the IBM BIOS, but instead of building their own PC clones with it, they began licensing their version to anyone who wanted to use it.
Then the hardware producers in Asia started stamping out shipping containers full of parts, component prices reached 'commodity' status, and IBM's perceived exclusive economies of scale were history.
Microsoft's non-exclusive terms with IBM let them license MS-DOS to anyone who wanted it, so the cloners were able to ship the same OS as IBM.
IBM still tried to compete, but their product cycle was twice as long as everyone else's. IIRC, Compaq was first to market with a 386-based system. IBM had defined the standards and then the cloners ran away with the market. Microchannel was IBM's attempt to regain the title of 'standard-bearer' for the computer industry, but the cloners took one look at the onerous licensing terms for MCA and said no thanks. They then formed their own coalition to develop standards for the hardware they were developing, and that was pretty much it for IBM as a force in the personal computing market.
So basically, IBM didn't "open source" their hardware purposely. They were victims of their own greed-- desperate to get a piece of the personal computer market as quickly as possible, they created an almost completely open system that was much more quickly and easily duplicated by third parties than they thought.
~Philly
Re:winder if a new DE will come out of this (Score:5, Informative)
Applications write drawing commands to a buffer.
When the buffer is full, the GL library makes a system call, and uses a special ioctl to DMA the command buffer into the graphics memory. The graphics card than carries out those commands.
That's very similar to how the X protocol works! You know why? Because both were designed to be abstract and network-transparent from the very beginning!
Re:Sun (Score:1, Informative)
Uh...dude, guess what, we sell Windows to our customers (as well as AIX, OS/400, OS/390, z/OS, etc) and we use all those OSes (and of course Linux) internally.
Re:This simply cannot be overstated (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Access (Score:4, Informative)
"You want to charge me $5 million for a mainframe by sending me a proposal that I can't read in Microsoft Office? Got take a hike!"
I am an IBMer, and I do send proposals to customers and they are *not* sent in Office format. Company policy is that proposals (since they're legal documents, even if they may or may not be "signable") are never sent to a customer in an editable format. The preferred format is printed paper, but PDF is often used.
That said, though your example is bad, your point is valid: We do exchange documents with clients, and Office formats are the ones most commonly used because Office is what everyone has. OpenOffice.org can work around most of these issues, but there are documents it doesn't handle. It will be interesting to see how that issue is addressed, assuming this is for real.
RTF (Score:2, Informative)
If you still have that document, just for grins, try opening the doc in openoffice and then save it as RTF. I've had word make some monster rtf's only to have OO reduce it to a third the size or less. To shave more fat off, go into the document properties and deselect APPLY USER DATA.
Although I suppose a 5 meg word file contains some tricky shit and OO won't open it properly anyways, it's always an interesting experiment.
Re:As far as IBM is concerned... (Score:3, Informative)
I am sorry to tell you that your assumptions and understandings are WRONG in a big way. First all these gulf countries are EQUALLY tyrannical. In saudi, its more conspicuous because its the biggest. Bahrain is the smallest of all these countries and believe me for this, its EQUALLY tyrannical. In none of these countries you cannot utter a word against these regimes. You dont have any freedom to express your views openly. The rule is a classic blend of monarchy and feudelism. Members of the royal families just share the country themselves. Its the same in Saudi, Bahrain , Kuwait and all the gulf countries. There is NO difference in the magnitude in any country including Kuwait. You know what ? Iran, a country which is offen treated as a tyranny, has MANY of these rights granted to the people . Its not ruled by some royal families. Nobody is taking the wealth away from people because of his family status or any other status(religion or anything). You have access to the books and magazines which widely criticize the governments and even Islam(needless to say these are not possible in other gulf countries). There is protest going on against the government. I am not saying things are perfect in Iran. But the level of freedom, democracy and other values are far more and better in Iran than any other gulf countries. Its a fact which the western media conveniently forget and ignore. Look at Turkish government. Its the same. They are Islamic but they are in synchrony with freedom and other progressive values(ofcourse in the limited Turkish setup and military constraints). Islam is a religion followed by people of these countries. Its a fact. And they want it to be there in their life. Unlike people in the western countries, they think their reliogion as something comprehensive and applicable to every aspect of life. Just because people in the western countries are not like this, doesnt mean that everyone is like that. Its a myth that what is going to come in these brutal dictatorship regimes are worse than this. Because there is no fact to substantiate this claim and any country which has gone away from these dictatorship regimes (e.g Iran) has more freedom and more democracy. And the more people stick with Islam(or any othe religion) its better as all the religions are preaching good things only.
Re:Zero chance of this (Score:3, Informative)
Huh?
GNOME 2.0 had geeks on Slashdot shrieking in agony over all the features that were cut from GNOME 1.x. Did you know that GNOME 2.x, by default, only has one way to maximize a window? Shocking!
So no, I don't think GNOME is bloated with featuritis. I think the GNOME guys have done a great job of paring things down to where you can quickly find the features you actually want to use.
steveha
P.S. If you actually miss the "maximize horizontally only" or "maximize vertically only" commands, you can choose to run GNOME with Sawfish and get them back.
Link to the commercial... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:My bet (Score:5, Informative)
and then we have Lotus Notes and Microsoft Office setup in Wine enivornments.
It's available for installation right now, however not everyone can use it because of certain applications that require specific things they've not gotten either emulated in Wine or replaced by a non-MS Specific application.
All you need is a diskette and about an hour and you too can wipe out your Windows Thinkpad or Desktop and off you go. Most of the engineering places that don't need a lot of the more verticle type applications like the Watson Labs and other labs have fully flipped to linux.
It's us types in the marketing/sales/customer facing environments that need specific apps that are holding us a back a bit.
Plus there's been no mandate. We all joke about it at tech conferences (I'm on the xSeries side) and such because everyone had 'heard' of this type of memo and a lot of our guys closer to using Linux more (IE not in the midwest but east and west coasts) have already converted over.
Most run VMware workstation to fire up windows on the rare opportunity that they need them. And the last guy I talked to about it as far back as August said he rarely ever needed to fire up Windows any more.
Re:winder if a new DE will come out of this (Score:3, Informative)
What you got on screen was the Workplace Shell.
Jurgen
Re:Access (Score:5, Informative)
The first step was to have Word convert it's own documents to see what happens, and Word does the same here as what FrontPage was famous for as well: Loads of markup code that isn't used (putting font code around an image, for example).
The most anoying part is that any in-document image is stored twice in Word-RTF. Once in hex-code, and once more in WMF-format. The latter will usually be 8 to 10 times the size of the hex-code representation, and can safely be removed. Word will still show your image normally... but should you save the document, it'd generate the WMF file inline again.
The code I wrote generated styled resumees, and the average document size went down from 150kb to around 10kb by switching to RTF. Opening and saving the file again in RTF with Word would bloat the file up to 2MB.
So, yes, RTF can be used to make styled documents the same as Word, and the document will actually be smaller, but don't let Word generate those documents for you. It'll bloat then.
Re:As far as IBM is concerned... (Score:5, Informative)
A person can maintain free will by being imprisoned: Conflicting Conditions [datanation.com]
If money exchanges hands in conjunction with game, then that game is a violent means of resolving conflict. Too Broad [datanation.com]