RSSThree new IBM / Linux partnerships aimed at a 'Microsoft-free' world
By Michael Hatamoto | Published August 6, 2008, 2:45 PM
At the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in San Francisco this week, IBM strengthened its ties with the open source community by announcing partnerships with Canonical, Red Hat and Novell.
SAN FRANCISCO (BetaNews) - IBM hopes adding its software to distributions of Ubuntu, Red Hat, and Suse Linux will help consumers transition to become "Microsoft-free."
Specifically, IBM is working to ensure its Open Collaboration Client Solution, including Lotus Symphony, Lotus Notes, and Lotus Sametime, operate with the three Linux distributions.
Canonical confirmed during the show that it will distribute Lotus Symphony through its own Web services before the end of the month. Red Hat and Novell are expected to follow suit.
Because of the high hardware demands of Windows Vista, Linux software makers have a unique opportunity to work with hardware manufacturers to release PCs and notebooks running Linux and other open source software, IBM said during LinuxWorld. This gives companies considering upgrades to their product offerings -- especially for the holidays -- an opportunity to select a well supported Linux distribution with low hardware requirements compared to Vista.
The Ubuntu booth on the show floor at LinuxWorld also has one IBM stand where an IBM employee is stationed, demonstrating Lotus Symphony operating on Ubuntu 8.04.1 LTS. The representative at the booth said that IBM doesn't anticipate an immediate impact, but hopes that the alliance will be able to slowly steal users away from Microsoft.
As part of the tenth anniversary of its involvement with Linux, IBM also launched its first certified open source software designed for Linux-based supercomputers. The latest high-performance computing open source software will be used with the Roadrunner project at the Los Alamos National Laboratory -- until just a few months ago, the world's fastest supercomputer.
Open-sourcing the software will enable the community at large to contribute code samples for the project, and will also be able to test new features and find bugs, IBM said during a press conference.
The new stack will be available first for IBM Power6 processors, but will be expanded to IBM Power 575 supercomputers and IBM x86 platforms over the next few quarters.
Good report by Michael Hatamoto. When you look at how far open source has come in the past ten years, it's pretty incredible. Linux won't be "replaced" by any OS in the future, scales devices from tiny to mainframes, and has expanded the open source ecosystem with Apache, Eclipse, Firefox, OpenOffice, Samba, and more. Though not well known to the public, SaaS and Cloud computing will continue to be significant applications of Linux.
With designers bringing out projects like KDE 4.1, I can never see myself going back to Windows. (It's that good!) So there are plenty of reasons to be extremely positive about the future of Linux and open source, and let Microsoft go the way of today's cannibilistic airline business.
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|KDE 4.1.1 is not THAT good. Vista beats it any day.
Let's talk when 4.5 comes out (which will be the *real* KDE 4).
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|For those who know well both products, how does Lotus Symphony compared to Open Office?
And BTW would another Office Suite like Lotus add more confusion or more assets?
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|If you are going to run an office or an enterprise on Linux what you save on License fees will be spent on administrators. Those guys get to decide which suite meets your needs and keep everybody up to date. Local economies love Free software.
So the more choices the better. Diversity is the bane of crackers.
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|Its sweet now, let Linux get to the desktop like MS or Apple then tell me how sweet it is, As long as Linux stays to a small market it will continue to thrive, give it the same market as MS and you honestly believe it will be just as stable? You are dreaming...
I applaud anything that makes MS work harder as it makes everyone make a better product, but you take MS away and you are heading in the same direction as the 90s.
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|Windows is unstable in comparison to Linux not because of its market size, but because it is closed. Opens source is a better model for stability of an OS. Microsoft is far more concerned with profitability over quality.
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|I dunno? IF a product were to get that big would it still continue to be open source?
I don't honestly know the answer to that question but I believe it would be a no...
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|"but you take MS away and you are heading in the same direction as the 90s. "
They were convicted as being an antitrust company in the 90's. Your statement makes no ****ing sense.
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|There are just too many variants of Linux out there for one alone to become such an overall threat. Linux is not a commercial product, its a co-operative effort. You're thinking like a capitalist.
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|I'm running KDE 4 on my desktop. It's geek sexy like a Mac only with Freedom. I haven't even looked at Vista so I can't compare but I am not turning around to go back in that direction. Mac is still the gold standard. I see plenty of those, my Ruby on Rails buddies all develop on Macs, but they host their sites on Linux.
The only reason to run Microsoft is to see how much extra work it will take to make a site look good in IE.
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|I agree, and KDE 4.1 is mindblowing compared to Vista's broadly reported failures with users. I thought Ubuntu would have to shake the earth, but it's KDE (and its accompanying apps) that will make you wish you ran Linux.
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|May be you can share with us some arguments? How comes that open source zoo withouy binary compatibility would make it easy to develop drivers (responsible for most of failures in OSes)?
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|I've used a friend's Vista laptop. It's the first Microsoft OS I'd actually call *pretty*. They successfully made Windows as pretty as Mac OS X. They absolutely succeeded in this.
(Of course, actually working on it was an exercise in pain. I was trying to install camera software for her. I eventually had to go to the command line, which thankfully hasn't disappeared completely.)
I've just installed KDE 4.1 on my Kubuntu 8.04 laptop. It's every bit as pretty and it works much better! Still clunky, but it's clear they're on the case and 4.2 is going to be spectacular. I urge everyone reading this to get KDE 4.1 and report bugs and interface problems as absolutely fast as you can ;-)
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|That's the world where I live already, and it's sweet.
... Oh, well I do keep a W2K VM. Like a little Microsoft terrarium off in the corner. It needs a live rat like once a month on a Tuesday.
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