Big penguin blues
- Article 4 of 16
- LinuxUser & Developer, December 2004
IBM's love-affair with Linux has entered a more mature phase, says Rob Buckley. Rather than adopt the mantle of revolutionary, IBM is using its sober, business-oriented company persona to get Linux into organisations.
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Power itself is an architecture used in a number of different environments and there are IBM Power chips inside the G5 Mac and the Xbox. On the server side, it’s primarily IBM, but we’ve done some work opening up Power so other people can use it. It’s going to a more open market. It becomes easier as you abstract applications. Java started that and Linux provides this abstraction, too.
You work closely with the OSDL and other standards organisations: what is IBM pushing to see in Linux?
We want Linux ready for enterprise applications. That’s why we’re interested in SMP [Symmetric MultiProcessing], security, RAS [Reliability, Availability, Serviceability] characteristics, kernel debugging and so on. With the Free Standards Group and the Linux Standards Base specification, we’re working out how to make software easier to run at all levels of Linux. Applications are key to an OS and if we make it easy to get the maximum reach on Linux for the minimum investment, that’s a good deal for ISVs (independent software vendors). We have over 300 products and three different platforms: Intel, Power, and Z-series (IBM’s mainframe platform). We’ve already got 300x3 lots of testing to do. We also support more than one Linux distribution to provide choice in marketplace, but you don’t want another 200 or even another five or ten – it will kill you in testing and support.
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