OFB Community Mailing Lists

[N. Thompson]

On February 13, 2005 05:15 pm, Bradly McConnell wrote:
> Greetings All,
>
> Well I just wanted to poll the group and see if anyone has an opinion
> about Sam Palmisano or Lous Gerstner of IBM, mainly focusing on Sam.
> Since he has been the driving force for IBM's move toward Linux, I
> just wanted to see what you guys have to say.
>
> I'm writing a paper on his main initiatives that are in place in an
> attempt to bring IBM back in good favor.  I didn't pick the paper, but
> I do see it as a slight opportunity to play Linux advocate to a very
> M$ embedded school.  Which that is an issue upon itself, and I'm
> transferring to another school for Fall '05.  They won't even
> acknowledge the existance of Firefox, OpenOffice, or anything "not
> Microsoft" other than SPSS statistics software, which of course is
> another very high dollar suite.
>
> What I'm mainly looking for is the general attitude towards IBM from
> the Linux/Open Source community with their recent changes focusing on
> services and software instead of big clunky iron.

I heard that prior to Microsoft being the bad guys, IBM was the much hated 
immoral monopoly; however, I wasn't around way back when these things 
supposedly happened so IBM has a fairly clean slate with me.

I can't help but wonder whether or not IBM is planning to make a Linux 
distribution of its own or purchase one of the existing ones and put their 
deep pockets full of cash behind it. IBM claims to be very pro-Linux and in 
support of the OSS movement, so I was hoping that they would do more than put 
some word of mouth behind the entire thing and actually invest in improving 
the product.

Red Hat, Mandrake and Novell all make usable alternatives to Windows but none 
of them are getting ahead of it where it matters to home users. In SUSE Linux 
for example Konqueror doesn't updates its contents when a file in the 
currently open folder is changed, in fact it almost frequently crashes. 
Novell isn't the only one that isn't putting together a well polished 
distribution either; all the distributions I can think of right now have 
significant bugs which aren't critical but do make the entire operating 
system seem unpolished and make Windows user laugh at what we claim to be the 
future. I believe that these mistakes are because most of those companies 
don't have the funds to improve the software to the needed extent, IBM on the 
other hand has deep pockets from what I've heard so they have a great 
advantage that cannot be matched even by Red Hat.

If I'm not misinformed IBM wanted to make a mainstream operating system once 
when they partnered with Microsoft to make OS/2, right now they have an 
apportunity that is unparallelled. IBM has the cash to hire on professional 
developers and software designers to improve the existing software and put 
together new applications that will make Linux more user friendly than 
Windows while maintaining all its advantages. What IBM has right now is more 
resources than any other company I know of that's making a Linux 
distribution, with that they could easily rise to the challenge of taking 
Linux to new heights so how come the only think I've ever seen them do for 
Linux is advertise it on TV sometimes, and occasionally make some of their 
programs open source?

If IBM is already doing these things than I want to hear about it, I've been 
waiting for a long time to have a distribution polished enough that Windows 
users will take one look at it and at least consider it. I know I'm going to 
get in hot water for mentioning these here but who amongst you list members 
can honestly say that GNU/Linux is 100% better than Windows or Mac OS X when 
it still has rough edges hidden behind all that eye candy and neat software. 
Furthermore, who amongst you list members can say that Linux wouldn't benefit 
from from a prosperous company investing in the operating system's future 
with not only money but professionally written code and bug fixes?

-- 
http://celerate.blogspot.com/