(Via ZDNet) I laughed all the way through after reading this. In 2000 IBM announced that it plans to spend a billion dollars on Linux. Today - There’s no IBM Linux distribution,no money went to the people behind the key technologies IBM relies on to make Linux work including Apache, mySQL, OpenOffice, and SAMBA. Their web sites offer Red Hat Linux for $799 or more, but the new Fedora Foundation is not getting any part of that billion bucks.
It’s not going to hardware either: IBM’s hurricane chipset is designed for Windows on Xeon, not Linux. Instead it’s Sun, not IBM, that’s about to release a wave of AMD based products using a chipset and board design specifically tailored to boost Linux (and Solaris x86) throughput( we do not know what fate awaits this with Sun & Microsoft coming together). IBM’s Jim Stallings said in April 2003: 250 people wihtin IBM are making contributions. Their full time job is making contributions to the kernel. That’s it. They don’t have another job sweeping the floor or working on Websphere or anything like that, IBM is making a real physical contribution to the open source community, both in terms of what we’re doing with our products, but also what we’re doing with the kernel. And these people are the ones who work on the kernel full time.
Paul Murphy asks that’s 250 experienced kernel level Unix developers, working on the kernel for over three years now- but no results commensurate seems to have come out. The efforts seem to show big numbers, but actually only accounts for about thirty million a year -leaving almost $900 million unaccounted for.Interesting, given the fact Microsoft says that their total research spending exceeded the oney spent on mission to moon - the contrast is there for everyone to see( agreed MS research may cover lot more spread) - the bigeest weakness of opensource movement would not be technical perse but the lack of orgnisational building blocks - capable of creating progress and sustaining momentum.
Category : Opensource
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