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Wednesday, March 08, 2006

IBM To Stay Away From Vista Usage Internally

Courtesy of P2Pnet, saw this - IBM has cancelled its contract with Microsoft as of October this year and shall not upgrade to Vista, says Andreas Pleschek, who runs IBM's open source and Linux technical sales efforts in north eastern Europe. Elhaard writes after listening to Andreas Pleschek in Groklaw IBM found out that they could use open source principles in-house, because open source "enhances multi-site development". They have purchased several products over the years (Lotus, Tivoli, WebSphere, DB2, etc.) and they wanted to break them up into smaller components that could be mixed and matched. But they discovered that the pieces did not fit together, because the different developers did not talk to each other. The determination of when to use open source is getting solved by IBM this way : Use opensource for commoditized software & proprietary software for specialized software - mainly because there is not enough community interest to drive a complex, fast development for something that only a few people need. A pendulum motion shall happen between the two, so the border between what is best solved by Open Source and what is best solved by proprietary software moves all the time.
I have heard this elsewhere as well : IBM will now offer three categories of software:
- Some will be Open Source, which they will help develop, sponsor or even donate to the Open Source community. Also, they will offer support and integration for it.
- Some software will still be proprietary - mostly their big, complex systems in full-blown versions.
- Some will be offered as closed source, but free download. That will often be watered-down versions of the proprietary software and may be called "community edition".
IBM’s idea of a closed source/free download idea may not be so appealing, but business exigencies may force it in order to protect the business for the full-blown versions. It could be the case that the 'community editions' is just a way to get people dependant on them in the hope that they will upgrade to paid-for versions later on. As i see it - what a corporate CIO would be looking in for - is demonstrable savings and increased benefits to attempt such a switch internally and so would like to see quantifiable benefits computed and shown - taking IBM's decision as the reference. The open source movement would also have to contend with rich set of third party applications that are available from the commercial software makers in the desktop segment. While I do know about alternate stacks centered on opensource being talked about, the real answer lay in wide usage - the poor/non advance on this front is something that open source proponents need to be concerned about. These are pretty intersting developments - all these may still give some leg support to open source at the bottom of the stack - even IBM's workplace using Redhat for desktops still has workplace as a licensed component within it - hopefully this would change moving forward - in all an interesting level of support isbeing offered by IBM to the opensource movement.



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Sadagopan's Weblog on Emerging Technologies, Trends,Thoughts, Ideas & Cyberworld
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