IBM Puts $100M Behind Linux Push 302
IainMH writes "Over at the BBC, there is a report that despite the slow build up, IBM is spending $100m (£52m) over the next three years beefing up its commitment to Linux software. It continues: 'The cash injection will be used to help its customers use Linux on every type of device from handheld computers and phones right up to powerful servers.'" Commentary and coverage also available on TechNewsWorld and ZDNet.
Put your money where your mouth is... (Score:5, Interesting)
desktop Linux (Score:4, Interesting)
I know it fits inbetween handhelds and servers somewhere, but it seems there's more Linux growth on those two ends (handhelds and servers) than in the middle, on desktops of Joe user.
IBM Linux Push Haiku (Score:2, Interesting)
IBM spends dough.
Pushing Linux for all apps.
Why do they hate Bill?
The desktop (Score:4, Interesting)
Right now Ubuntu looks OK for the Gnomers and XandrOS is just fine for the KDErs [IMHO]. The most important thing here is to have a desktop that works out-of-the-box.
OS/2 (Score:2, Interesting)
IBM are the do-everything company (Score:3, Interesting)
The thing to remember about IBM is that the are the do-everything company. Where Sun, or Microsoft, or Apple etc. try and sell you one vision of the future, IBM invest in everything, and let you decide what you want.
Want to run Linux sir? No problem! Or Windows? No problem too. Proprietary UNIX? We've got it. Have we got some bizarre other operating systems? Have we ever!
We'll sell you an Intel server, a RISC based unix server, an AMD server, any bizarre server you like. Stuck in the 80s and can't decide whether you want fat clients or thin clients and a mainframe? No problem, we've got mainframes, we've got PCs (until recently, of course).
My point is that IBM may be investing $100m in Linux, but chances are, they are also investing $100m in everything else too. That's the IBM way- because they never stick all of their chips on one technology, they never win big (like Wintel has done), but they never lose their shirts either (like Sun looks like doing, and HP looks like doing with Itanic)
Watched the flash demo of IBM Workspace (Score:3, Interesting)
I watched the demo and it looks interesting enough. The question is, do you trust IBM not to lock you into their "all encompassing" back-office infrastructure with no-interoperability? Or Do you just want to swallow the pill and drink MS's cool aid?
What I would like to see is some sort of reasonably easy to program middleware that is cross-platform (XUL for example) to take the place of platform specific proprietary clients. This way the user's PC is not weighed down.
I suppose some people might point out that you can already kind of do this with X terminals, but it seems that using the browser as the way to do everything, either through XUL or HTML/J2EE..ect is the direction people WANT to move in.
IBM and Linux (Score:5, Interesting)
I see they are finally making progress on integrating more of the hardware into the software ( IE partitioning is kindof working ). But for the most part I spend 3x the time managing the IBM hardware then real commodity hardware like dell's. With commodity hardware I can find better documentation, better written toolchains ( free toolclains that can be altered ). With IBM's I have to reverse engeneer how the software works just to figure out why it stoped working.
Overall it's just an odd fit. IBM is trying to commodidize the OS so they don't have to worry about it, but the problem with that is it leads to the result that commodity hardware is better supported, not what IBM is selling! So the more they push Linux the more we are moving away from IBM hardware and moving to true commodity hardware like Dell's ( at less than half the price per CPU ). IBM hardware may be reliable, but st some point it's just not worth 2x or more of the price.
Re:A BIG ally like IBM... (Score:5, Interesting)
How far could you push a generic box? Linux is a router, is a tivo, is a phone system, is a PC, is a whatever you dream up. Sell a platform for it, do what Dodge did with the K-car, and sit back and count the cash.
Maybe that's why they teamed up with Sony for the PS3?
Re:Put your money where your mouth is... (Score:4, Interesting)
I actually like a lot of distros from a design perspective, but I simply cannot stand RPM as a package managemrent system. This could well be because I am not doing this "correctly", but even with yum, I feel like the entire package design was never meant for a centralized, automated repository, and it breaks my heart that so many great distros use it (SuSe is one I love except for RPM).
Enter debian, which changed my Linux world as far as package management. It is head and shoulders above the RPM distros. I abandoned it because of the complexity of maintaining a cutting edge desktop that was reasonably stable. I found that upgrading a single package would sometimes bring down the house of cards of my carefully balanced dependencies between testing and unstable. Meh.
So, here I am, another Slashbot Gentoo fanboi. I run Gentoo on all my home computers (MythTV AMD Athlon XP box, AMD 64 desktop and Centrino laptop) and couldn't be more satisfied. It is package management nirvana...even major upgrades for for KDE, xorg-x11 or compiler upgrades go fairly smoothly. My only real gripe is that sometimes people post ebiuld that haven't been tested, so things can break "for no reason" and you have to go read around the forums to see if it's you, or something in the ebuild repository. I really don't mind waiting a couple of minutes for most compiles. Even kde-base and xorg-x11 are OK, I just leave them overnight. Besides, if you need to get up an moving in a hurry, just use the reference platform to get running, and compile in the background.
My point is that railing on "Linux package mangement" is a bit broad...I haven't even addressed Slackware packages because I don't know how they work (it's the only major distro that I've never used). And I'll tell you what: all of them are light years ahead of Windows.
Oh, BTW, I ran KDE on a PII 400 with no problems. And that was the MORE bulky KDE 2. KDE 3 is actually lighter as far as runtime resources. Linux is all about customization...you just have to know where to trim the fat. =)
Re:Put your money where your mouth is... (Score:3, Interesting)
GNUstep [gnustep.org], and we already have (thanks to using X) a client-server mechanism; something lacking in Aqua and badly implemented in NeXTSTEP. What's needed is for GNUstep to become easier to deploy and get more apps available - unfortunately because KDE and GNOME are already out there people are using them as the 'good enough' alternative. Just as Linux is the already out there, 'good enough' alternative to the HURD/Trix.
Re:Start at home! (Score:1, Interesting)
You might have noticed the term "Workplace" occurring more than a few times on that Lotus page you linked to.
From TFA:
Granted, that quote is written in IBM-market-speak. But, from what I've been able to find out, Workplace is essentially IBM's new model for groupware. Not surprisingly, it's based on Websphere and DB/2 on the server, with either a browser-based client, or a rich client based on Eclipse. Both the browser and rich clients run on Linux.
I don't think even IBMers will describe Notes/Domino as premier anything for much longer.
Re:Put your money where your mouth is... (Score:2, Interesting)
There was also no hint of AIX or any other unix-like system. The only OS choices were Microsoft® Windows® XP Home Edition and Microsoft® Windows® XP Professional.
This doesn't exactly give me a good feeling that they want to sell to us linux geeks.
OTOH, you can go to EmperorLinux [emperorlinux.com], where you'll see a flock of IBM laptops for sale with linux installed, or dual-boot Windows/linux if you like.
So maybe IBM is just trying to support the independents like EmperorLinux? Think so?
Re:IBM you BM we all BM for IBM - David Gerrold (Score:4, Interesting)
Heh. We're getting there fast. I recently came off a several-year project to wean a big corporation (who shall remain nameless here to protect the clueless
The approach that worked was to show them some of IBM's web sites, and say "See? Linux is an IBM product."
Now, most readers here will probably think this is a joke. While I agree it's tremendously funny; fact is that it worked. They didn't see through the rather ambiguous wording at all. To their fuzzy minds, linux is indeed an IBM product, since IBM sells it.
Actually, the techies at the big corp also thought this was really funny. Most of them have either linux or OSX (or both) on their personal machines. And when I set up demos of our stuff via web sites, they knew exactly what to do with them. In fact, they mostly lost interest in the GUI stuff we were developing, and only wanted to talk about the Web interface, which became a significant part of my job.
But there is a widespread attitude among management that "computer" and "IBM machine" are synonyms. If it doesn't come from IBM, it's not a computer. And Microsoft is a division of IBM, of course.
We've had this attitude in the business community for over 40 years now, and we're probably not going to change it. The best approach probably is to get the message out that "Linux is an IBM product". This is all that most managers will want to see, and they don't want to hear any discussion of the details. Details are for underlings.
We'll know we've won when we start hearing the media talk about linux as an "IBM product". Most of the media consists of people who also think that IBM is the only real computer company, Microsoft makes IBM software, and all those other companies are insignificant.
We can probably also add to the confusion by pointing out that IBM has always supported free software. They sell computers; those computers come with all that software at no extra charge; this has been true since the 1950's. That'll be convincing. Details like "free as in beer" and "free as in speech" is way over their pretty talking heads (though some of them will understand "free as in disk space"
Outside the geek community, fuzzy thinking and fuzzy speech is the norm.