IBM is positive about the possibility of bringing out its DB2 under an open source license. While the computing giant has no immediate plans to open source DB2, market conditions may make it unavoidable, according to Chris Livesey, IBM's UK director of information management software. "We have a light version of the product offered for free, which is a step towards exposing our core (DB2) technology," said Livesey. "Looking at IBM's heritage in contributing to the open source market, we've been particularly keen to lead that market. Open source is an interesting space, as a whole. As the future unfolds, and the economics become clearer, there's going to be more commitment to open source by everybody. We've made good steps towards that."
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Member since:2006-05-12
Member since:2007-07-27
Member since:2006-10-18
The Sun fanbois on this site want to blast IBM for its self-interested motives regarding open source, but all you have to do is look at these three examples to see that Sun is the same:
OpenOffice.org - product acquisition. Couldn't make money off of StarOffice, so they tried to gain competitive position by offering it as open source.
OpenSolaris - Regardless of technical merit, Solaris was having its lunch eaten by Linux. Open-Sourcing Solaris was a bold move aimed at removing the ROI argument for switching from Solaris to Linux.
OpenJDK - Sun dragged its feet for years on Open-Sourcing Java, after repeated requests by IBM (arguing that there is no competitive advantage to be had in core JDK technology - a fair argument). After the Harmony project started gaining momentum and with open source runtimes for .Net available, Sun had little choice but to Open-Source Java.
Those who argue that Sun is a bigger friend of open source than IBM conveniently forget that Sun's motivations, as a publicly-traded company, are the same as IBM's. All decisions must be made to deliver greater value to the shareholders.
Member since:2007-07-27
I dont know about the other things, but I know that Java took long time because SUN had to prove that they owned each line of code. And that took long time and hard work. Still there are third party stuff that SUN can not open in Java. Same problem with OpenSolaris. Solaris can not be opened at will, because of lots of third party code. OpenSolaris has no third party code in it.
And also SUNs attempt to standardize Java didnt went well, because Microsoft stopped it. Motivation? "It it not good that a single company have that much influence on a standard" (OOXML anyone?)
http://www.openmalaysiablog.com/2007/09/microsoft-conde.html
And still SUN did some bad things in the past, with Scott McNealy. But hey, all those CEOs (Gates, Ballmer, Ellison, etc) have the same mentality. McNealy is no different from those. But this new CEO is totally different. He opens everything and gives it away. Which other big company has opened it's crown jewels? No one. Sun is the only one doing this. And giving everything away. This was unthinkable of, with McNealy as CEO. But things change.
Member since:
2005-11-18
Counted by lines of code and human years Sun wins there with a large margin, since they have opensourced OpenOffice.org, OpenSolaris, OpenJDK, and others.
Have a look at this report (page 51) for statistics:
http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/ict/policy/doc/2006-11-20-flossimpac...
IBM seems to come in second, Red Hat third. Of course, there are other possible measures as well, such as community participation.
Edited 2008-06-17 10:35 UTC