Leading, but carefully
- Article 11 of 16
- LinuxUser & Developer, April 2006
Rob Buckley finds out how Big Blue is finding life with open source, and how it mixes idealism with pragmatism
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IBM is one of the most well known evangelists of open source to businesses. After famously investing $1 billion in Linux in 2001, it has continued to wave the open source banner, backing a variety of open source projects and releasing a number of its software packages, including the Eclipse development environment, which reportedly cost it $40 million to develop. But with open source now making inroads in markets where IBM has yet to open the source of its own software, how committed is IBM to the idea of open source? Will it continue to release the source code of its software, no matter what, or will it pick and choose the programs that are most convenient?
Fraser Davidson, the UK head of IBM Software, gives us a progress report on IBM’s experience with the market so far and the company’s overall strategy for open source in the future. The message is: it’s still early days for open source and we’re going to be taking things slowly.
LU&D: You’ve moved from the closed source market to the Linux market and now to selling open source applications. How’s this latest stage of your open source strategy faring?
FD: It’s too early to tell at the moment. We’re in the process of collecting results. Although we’ve been involved from a strategy and investment standpoint, products-wise, we’re a reasonably new entrant so we’re still finding out the answers to questions like “How is this working?” and “How do we architect our business around it?”
Our primary reason for entering [the open source market] has really been it gives us access to a marketplace and customers, rather than because we were expecting people to do much effort around developing products, say.
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