More then any other large traditional technology company, IBM has embraced the open source community. But what is their long-term strategy for Linux? Read on…
Maybe you can credit the 1996 Olympics. That was the year IBM chose to showcase a 53-node RS/6000 SP system as the brawn behind the brains of the Atlanta Olympics. As millions of fans logged on, Big Blue’s machine kept pace, doling out real time event results in what was considered a major PR success for stodgy old IBM as it tried to prove that it too was a contender in the newly emerging Internet space.
There was just one catch. The Web server software running IBM’s olympic site wasn’t from IBM. It was Apache.
Within two years of its Olympic success, IBM had publicly recognized the folly of developing its own Web server software and had thrown its efforts behind the open source Apache effort. The decision, made in 1998, was a pragmatic one. IBM’s internally developed WebSphere Web server was not getting much traction in the Internet space, and the company wanted to base the rest of its WebSphere middleware on industry-standard software. “The only way we could get mindshare was to pick up one of the top three Web servers,” remembers James Barry, a VP of strategic initiatives at Collab.net, who was a program director with IBM at the time. “Microsoft and Netscape didn’t work out, so that left us with Apache,” he adds. This was the first, cautious step for IBM, the open source company.
IBM’s relationship with open source code…
Please log in to view this content.
Not Yet a Member?
Register with LinuxMagazine.com and get free access to the entire archive, including:
