IBM Promises $1B Investment In Linux Development 109
itwbennett writes with a link to a story you'll need to mentally upgrade from "expected to" to "just happened" about IBM's $1 billion dollar investment in Linux officially announced Tuesday morning at LinuxCon (the WSJ broke the story yesterday), by IBM VP Brad McCredie. IBM, says the linked article, will use all that money "to promote Linux development as it tries to adapt Power mainframes and servers to handle cloud and big data applications in distributed computing environments. The investment will fund Linux application development programs for IBM's Power servers and also be used to expand a cloud service where developers can write and test applications for Power servers before deployment. It will also facilitate software development around IBM's new Power8 chips, which will go into servers next year."
It's not the only time that IBM has recently tossed around the B-word, and as Nick Kolakowski notes at Slash BI, it's also not the first time IBM has put that much money into Linux.
$1 Billion Towards THEIR OWN ARCHITECTURE. (Score:4, Interesting)
The phrase '$1 Billion' gets people to sit up and notice.
But most of this work won't benefit the Linux community and software at large, at least directly. It will be ancillary improvements; where something gets re-written/improved/fixed due to issues on the POWER architecture that happen to benefit everyone else too. Hopefully these are many and useful.
Still, any investment shows that Linux is Serious Business.
Re:one BILLION... (Score:4, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Does it cost them anything? (Score:4, Interesting)
As a developer at IBM for 10+ years, doing Linux and PowerPC for a large portion of that time. I am wondering why I am laid off and working for HP now. One hand does not know what the other is doing it seems.
My experience at IBM was that often, not only does one hand not wash the other, but one hand is actively arm-wrestling the other. You can bet that the AIX group is plotting the overthrow of this upstart Linux thing, and the AS/400 group is plotting the demise of this microcomputer flash-in-the-pan thing, and the Z-series group is plotting the comeback of 3179's on the desktop.
Re: Linux is developed by corps not hobbyists (Score:4, Interesting)
Time is significant. Linux was originally developed mainly by hobbyists. After awhile a few corporations started subsidizing development, first by donations of equipment, and later by actually hiring people to ensure that it would run on their hardware. The people they tended to hire were those who were already acknowledged as experienced and talented.
Currently there are still a few pure hobbyists, but most developers have commercial subsidy, or are employed by some corportion or other. (I'm including, e.g., Red Hat.) There are multiple reasons. One is that a greater proportion of currently developing programmers are less into systems work. Another is that the system has become significantly more complex. (Most of the low-hanging fruit has already been picked.) Etc.
OTOH, do note that new distros are still being created. But also note that they tend to be created by forking an existing popular distro. The system is currently too complex for one person, and probably for one team of people, to manage a complete general purpose distro, like Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat, or Suse. Slackware seems to be a counter example to this claim, but I don't know it well enough to know that it actually is.
Also, to be accepted as a kernel developer, you need to have a track record. And that takes time and effort. There are still some specialized areas that a person can use to break in (keeping documentation current is probably still such a place), but it's a lot more difficult than it used to be, because there are so many people submitting patches. It's much easier to do that if you have someone already accepted to vouch for you, and also to lead you through the process. And, as stated, most of those are currently people paid to work on the system as their job.
So, yes, it has developed into a system largely developed by people employed by corporations. And many of them are, indeed, the same people who started out doing this as a hobby.