How committed is IBM to the open-source movement? Officially, IBM is the world’s loudest promoter of open-source software, spending millions to run Linux advertisements and fund an open-source development lab, and devoting hundreds of its own programmers to cranking out open-source code.On the same site, “Free as in freedom” used to be the rallying cry of the open source movement, back in the day when volunteer hackers did the programming. Now, with big companies writing most new open source code, will some of that freedom go away? Will the movement be co-opted? Maybe it already has been.
Free Software? Not For You, Baby And The Big Blue Muzzle
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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IBM has probably donated more code and engineering talent than any other company, much more so than HP I would guess. Just because IBM chooses to still sell some of their proprietary product does not make them less committed to open source.
IBM is a huge company with lots of different divisions, so it is only natural for there to be competing interestes among them. It’s similar to Sony selling music CDs with one hand and selling the devices to rip, burn and pirate music CDs with the other.
IBM is a corporation, the author is correct in stating that its chief concern is to keep share holders happy. When sh** hits the fan, IBM’s not going to play Robin Hood.
On the other hand we should be grateful to IBM for the gigantic effort they are putting into Linux and Open Source in general.
So long as it is open source it is open source. So long as it is gpl it is ‘free as in freedom.’ It doesn’t matter who is writing the code.
As far as what IBM is doing, they are a business. They operate by what is most profitable. I like that there are large businesses behind open source, but as always they aren’t necessary. They weren’t around for bsd, linux, etc at their conception.
HP’s Martin Fink:
Once or twice a month I’m seeing this. In an IBM account with lots of AIX, they do everything they can to protect their proprietary stuff.
If HP is not protecting their HP-UX accounts against Linux, then HP-UX surely is dead. R.I.P.
“Now, with big companies writing most new open source code, will some of that freedom go away?”
>>>>>>>>>>>
Is this true, do companies write the most open source code?
Good question. If it is GPL, it matters not, except that the company owns the rights over the code; not the individual (at least, in most companies you as employee transfer the copyright to the company). It also depends on the situation; for example if you code on GCC you transfer your copyright to the FSF and state that you are the one who developed the changes (this is against legal threats).
“Once or twice a month I’m seeing this. In an IBM account with lots of AIX, they do everything they can to protect their proprietary stuff.”
This is not true. IBM, SGI (maybe even NewSCO/Caldera, not sure) are two companies who both distributed proprietary Unices and they opened up parts of their code (Linux JFS is based on OS/2 though). IBM argued can’t open up everything from AIX, and partly this might be because of their license (this is also a part of the SCO case). It has also been said IBM researched wether they could open-source AIX which was not the case, but those are afaik rumors. Attacking IBM on this while they’ve got a lawsuit tightly related to this, how smart.
I don’t know any of the proprietary UNIX companies who are going the Free Software path of all software should be free. Most are instea walking the Open Source path of some software is free. IMB is not unique in that aspect.
PS: HP, please don’t delete information from your website related to older hardware you’re not selling anymore. Especially not if it cannot be found anywhere else. Now, that sucks…
“The enemy of my enemy is my friend” … What is gaining IBM from Linux? Well is digging a hole in MS market share. IBM by itself probably already realized wont be able to deal with MS on its own(think why OS/2 is no longer a “known” player).
Also, Linux is a low-priced option for their Global Services to offer to customers instead of their higher priced AIX. But, if company already paid for AIX, why let it to use a cheaper option when it is already obvious it has enough resources for this option? Even more, there is enough investment in a AIX based solution for just to drop it and use linux (remember large systems migration is a pain, you may ask Standaford University about it).
Linux is so widespread in bussiness (and growing) that it will be stupid from IBM not to try to have an slice of this market (also, part of this new market ate general *nixs previous market).
IBM main interest is being as an important player in tech field as it could
IBM definitely does not want Linux devs talking about anything before the big SCOdown in the courtroom. IBM is not a Linux company, they’re a support company. Whether you choose Linux or AIX, you’re also paying for support. If they can get more money from AIX, they will.
And they don’t get credit for it.
Until IBM release DB2 under an open source license I would say that their strategy is completely flawed and that they are against open source…
IBM makes commercial software and they support open source so they cut into microsoft’s terrority.
Furthermore, they aren’t in the operating system market as their OS’s are tied to their hardware (OPPOSED TO SUN).. they want to kill all the other competetion.
it’s business. they don’t like open source. ever since SCO sued them because of a dispute between the development of AIX and UnixWare together open source people have naturally flocked to IBM.. But the question is, if somehow, if SCO is proven in court against IBM.. will people still flock to it? Linux fans really started supporting IBM after that lawsuit. They all seem to hate sun because they compete. Sun has done so much more for open source than ANY OTHER CORPORATION.
Sun has done a hell of alot more than IBM. IBM is using their unique position among opoen source people due to the SCO suit to hurt Sun. like open source Java and other things they are leaking. like the thing that Java would cut sun’s costs if it were open sourced. Very untrue. Sun says it woudl raise costs.
go ahead, call me ignorant
IBM have full range of products from low end PC to Mainframe. They still selling DOS!
They was using OS/2 to againts MS Windows. Now They just change to Linux.
Actually their support on Windows and Linux is not good as their own OS.
They produce Linux/Windows software, since they would like to attract some new customer. Once a new customer use it, he will soon to upgrade to AIX, AS/400 etc…
There are very few companies that are 100% open source companies. Redhat is in a tiny minority and Novell seems to be heading that way.
Companies like Sun, IBM, Apple, MS, etc have a huge investment in closed source software. These are not collaborative projects that are still in evolutionary development. They are generally the benchmarks for their industry.
AIX, Solaris are enterprise level operating systems, there is little in terms of features that could be added by open sourcing. Linux is only just getting to this level, and only with the aid of SGI, HP, IBM (Sun?)
DB2 and Oracle are the mainstays of the database industry. There is nothing open source quite in the same market. MySQL and Postgres (the latter in particular) are threatening to encroach on their market, but I’d hardly compare them at this point.
Windows (despite all the snickering) is probably the benchmark for a desktop operating system. MS has somewhat dropped the ball in delaying Longhorn so long. Apple and Linux are making serious inroads in terms of design an usability.
These products do not benefit from open source. I do not need to read the source for DB2, in fact reading it wouldn’t tell me anything. I don’t expect to get it for free. The only important thing for us is that I’m free to try and write a DB2 clone or free to add DB2 features to my open source database of choice.
If IBM, Oracle or MS use patents, copyrights or other monopolistic constructions to stop me then I/we have a serious social problem.
“Until IBM release DB2 under an open source license I would say that their strategy is completely flawed and that they are against open source… ”
cut the crap. why db2?. in that case why not java or solaris or whatever. neither ibm nor sun would open source everything. that doesnt make any business sense for them. so stop whining. if you are saying sun does more prove it by giving more points
“it’s business. they don’t like open source. ever since SCO sued them”
That’s your assumption which is based on […]. I’m afraid on nothing.
“because of a dispute between the development of AIX and UnixWare together open source people have naturally flocked to IBM..”
Please provide your source and quote the relevant lines from the IBM spokes(wo)man who said this. I’m afraid you won’t provide me this very quote, while i’m able to write great contradicting stories from the company you’re a fanboy of.
“But the question is, if somehow, if SCO is proven in court against IBM.. will people still flock to it?”
Your question is based on a premise which is most likely “no” to MANY, MANY people on this planet (an indicator is SCO’s revenue on SCOsource, though not very accurate).
“Linux fans really started supporting IBM after that lawsuit.”
Already since 1999. Ofcourse the SCO case added value to it, whereas Sun paid SCO for some obscure license from SCO. Other things include “too little too late” regarding Sun’s Linux adoption. License of JDS, name, software included; there’s all criticism on that. There are many reasons why the relation between Sun and the FLOSS community is -in general- not very well.
“They all seem to hate sun because they compete.”
I don’t think so. One reason “why” can be found above.
“Sun has done so much more for open source than ANY OTHER CORPORATION.”
PLEASE PROVIDE PROOF FOR YOUR WILD ASSERTION.
“AIX, Solaris are enterprise level operating systems, there is little in terms of features that could be added by open sourcing. Linux is only just getting to this level, and only with the aid of SGI, HP, IBM (Sun?)”
No, Sun is not really aiding much in the development of the Linux kernel. See some recent changelogs for example.
(And no, GNOME is not Linux. FreeBSD, Solaris, IRIX and you name it aren’t GNOME either.)
I think “Someone” describes the situation in accuracy.
“cut the crap. why db2?. in that case why not java or solaris or whatever.”
You’ve bitten the bait. He’s just repeating -without additional arguments- what J. Schwarz said in response to IBM’s public letter which argumented for an open source “Sun Java”. It’s the same chello.se person who’s always attacking Linux and defending Sun and/or Solaris. I’m wondering what his interests are, and when he’ll realize that Sun wants to be friends with the FLOSS community.
Maybe finally IBM’s seeing that open source doesn’t actually pay the bills.
Open source is exactly like the napster phenomenon. People were up in arms when Napster was shutdown because the RIAA was shutting down a free service – if Napster was a service that only geared towards musicians it would have been great success because everybody who was a musician would be creating and sharing and adding back to music and using Napster in a meaningful way.
Similarly people who only want “free beer” software are the most vocal proponants of open source. They don’t write or help develop apps.
In the good old days of open source – only developers were using open source (to help other developers) and there wasn’t any commercialization of open source that perverted the goals. Open source in the good old days was about nifty algorigthms or neat program that were of no value to “Joe User”. But as soon as people started pandering to Joe User, open source ideals went out the window because now people started to make neat and nifty programs just knock-offs of other programs and added more complexity so that Joe user can fork out big bucks to have them “fixed” or “integrated”
You failed to make a distinction between corporate users and home users. I fail to see how your analogy with Napster is able to correlate with the distinction between corporate users and home users. I fail to understand how one is not able to make this distinction while in this age of piracy home users are generally not paying nor willing to pay for a license whereas with open source one does not pay for a license of the software.
I dunno about most, maybe a large chunk. Is most of the OSS work really now done by corporations or funded by them? I would say more like 10% from my perspective.
cut the crap. why db2?. in that case why not java or solaris or whatever. neither ibm nor sun would open source everything. that doesnt make any business sense for them. so stop whining. if you are saying sun does more prove it by giving more points
So then stop calling IBM some open source enthusiast then.
Sun has contributed to almost all major open source projects amoung these you’ll find for instance X and Gnome not to mention that their listed FIRST (that is before IBM) on Apache page of thank you notes for donations. Sun is a MAJOR contributor to open source, they are VERY committed and IBM looks like an embarassing joke in comparison.
IBM is same ol’ evil big blue, make no mistake.
On another note, I don’t keep hearing IBM saying “competition is good, that’s why we open up specs for Java to let everyone make their own implementation”… No man, that’s SUN talking.
Please OSNEWS, next time mention in the little snippet-summary that the article is actually written by Dan lyons and hosted on Forbes.com. This will save your readers lots of clicks.
I just waisted one click.
Please do same for articles by Rob Enderle, Laura D’idio and the like. Thanks in advance for furture consideration.
millions is peanuts to IBM, they get the entire open source world to take their side and they remove thier competetors as they attempt to become a server monopoly.
i hate you IBM.
Shows on you. You don’t convince people with FUD like this
“millions is peanuts to IBM, they get the entire open source world to take their side and they remove thier competetors as they attempt to become a server monopoly.”
though.
Sun being such a Good contributor to FLOSS when compared to IBM. I’m willing to believe that and i know developers from SUN UK are important to GNOME for example, no doubt, but where are the hard numbers? Relative numbers, indication of development, relevance all add up; means it’s very hard to tell who’s a better contributor. The burden of proof lies at the SUN advocates. If you want to advocate SUN i doubt you’ll win the battle by critizing IBM and RedHat with FUD.
IBM contributions between Linux kernel 2.6.6 and 2.6.7: 177. SUN contributions between Linux kernel 2.6.6 and 2.6.7: 0. No, i’m not saying SUN should support the development of the Linux kernel. All their choice. I’m not saying IBM supports FLOSS more with this either. Saying SUN contributed to the Linux kernel is true; saying the contributions were as much as IBM’s, is false.
All complex, some blur statements as part of a rant doesn’t help much. Sources, numbers, thoroght analysis will have better impact and can also be used in similar discussions; this discussion is brought up frequently. If it’s really a good one it might even get linked to at websites like /. and Groklaw.
Here we go again
Shows on you. You don’t convince people with FUD like this
Another arrogant zealot statement, I guess that made your entire point worthless… and you continue with the rant.
Sun being such a Good contributor to FLOSS
FLOSS???? We were talking Open Source, that’s hardly an equal sign between them now is it…
means it’s very hard to tell who’s a better contributor. The burden of proof lies at the SUN advocates. If you want to advocate SUN i doubt you’ll win the battle by critizing IBM and RedHat with FUD.
Since it’s so hard to tell, then why is the burden on Sun rather than IBM? Because http://www.Linuxmusttakeovertheworld.org says so? Geee that’s hardly a constructive is it. There’s no burdain on Sun here, rather IBMs heritage which can make you doubt A LOT!!! Read up on what happened in the 80’s please.
IBM contributions between Linux kernel 2.6.6 and 2.6.7: 177. SUN contributions between Linux kernel 2.6.6 and 2.6.7: 0. No, i’m not saying SUN should support the development of the Linux kernel. All their choice. I’m not saying IBM supports FLOSS more with this either. Saying SUN contributed to the Linux kernel is true; saying the contributions were as much as IBM’s, is false.
Linux Kernel? One little piece of software? Is that what you use as a measurement? WHo cares about that kernel, look on Well spread software like Apache… check on that marketshare then check your tiny little kernel.
While at it, how about checking X, that’s like used in all *Nix systems out there, isn’t that a little more interesting than some tiny overhyped kernel? You shouldn’t even be happy that IBM is contributing to the kernel, that’s how SCO get to put in all the “FUD” like I guess you’d call it.
Sun is THE contributor, IBM isn’t…
You got anything to show the opposite?
“Since it’s so hard to tell, then why is the burden on Sun rather than IBM?”
Hohoho. Sun _advocates_ are tho ones who appear to claim such statements here. Based on what? The burden of proof lies at them.
“Linux Kernel? One little piece of software? Is that what you use as a measurement?”
No, as example which proofs otherwise. One was saying “all major FLOSS projects”; the Linux kernel clearly is one.
“Sun is THE contributor, IBM isn’t…”
Strawman.
“You got anything to show the opposite?”
I gave one example which shows the opposite. Other than that, i have never claimed i believe IBM is a bigger contributor to FLOSS than SUN is.
You have not stated any thorough analysis; the burden of proof lies at you. Try again.