IBM has marked its 10 years of participation in Linux and open source with an open source code contribution focused on supercomputing.
IBM has marked its 10 years of participation in Linux and open source with an open source code contribution focused on supercomputing.
i would have been more impressed to hear AIX being opensourced
Never going to happen.
yeah, open sourcing any form of unix these days takes a tremendous amount of money and luck as there is a lot of code in the aix code base not owned, but rather licensed, by ibm. sun open sourcing solaris took a tremendous amount of effort and capital that started several years before the opensolaris website went up, something most people tend to forget when they call for a company to open source their unix offering. for a product like aix, irix or even windows, giving away the source code would be next to impossible unless you have a lot of drive to do so, and more importantly, have a business reason for doing so. for sun, it was obvious: opensolaris is far more friendly to a common sysadmin compared to solaris 8 and 9….therefore, they are apt for more sales in their future with their existing and potential customers.
in any case, i’ve been very happy with ibm for the last 8 years and they’ve shown themselves to be true players in the open source market. dig deep in any of your linux distros and other software and you’re going to find a lot of previously proprietary ibm software.
Edited 2008-08-06 18:47 UTC
I take it from my recent Groklaw browsing that Sun didn’t make tremendous efforts… they made a deal with SCO to that effect, and which in essence is pants because SCO could not grant Sun any such rights as we all know now…
Its never enough is it? If Adobe open sourced flash, you’d complain that they didn’t open source dreamweaver.
actualy my comment wasn’t made ont he basis that everything should be open source, in fact i couldnt care less if the code is avalible or not as long as the product is good, solid, and does what i need.
i was only making the comment becuase this piece of news is the kind of thing you see on a slow media day where there isnt much to report, and the news in and of itself isnt all that interesting.
Well, I’d have to agree with you that it isn’t that interesting.
no, if they opensourced flash, i would file a police report against them for trying to reenact the black plague..
Yeah but what this open sourcing supercomputer something really means? I read the original article and didn’t find much more information about whole thing. I mean this sounds same like Aston Martin announcing all DB9 owners get free carpets or something. Nice for them but is it any use for rest of us.
All the *BSDs are open source and are direct UNIX derivatives… we do not need another UNIX into the current ecosystem.
But yes, we need Solaris, Irix, Aix, we actually need as much Unix as we can get. What we really need is to remove Windows from the current ecosystem.
Addin’ more UNICES into the field just fragments the current *NIX marketshare, does not increments it.
To throw away Windows from the ecosystem we need to develop (with “we” I mean “the community” because I did not contribute anything … yet) a more final user-friendly OS able to compete with Windows and Mac.
Every Unix brings something unique to the community. I’d rather have diversity than just one Unix. Internal competition is also very healthy, not only external competition (e.g. against Microsoft). Maybe a unique set of standards regarding packaging and installing software would be what the Unix-Linux ecosystem needs.
“Every Unix brings something unique to the community. I’d rather have diversity than just one Unix. Internal competition is also very healthy, not only external competition (e.g. against Microsoft). Maybe a unique set of standards regarding packaging and installing software would be what the Unix-Linux ecosystem needs.”
Actually all the Unixes are the same, and bring no diversity in reality. The only diversity they bring is that you have to learn them all as standard commands such as ls have different options on each one. That is not diversification, that is lunacy. I do agree that standards is what the Unix ecosystem needs, meaning they contribute to one another and are unique, the problem is right now they are not. They are only unique in the respect of you have to relearn how to do things with each one, using the same commands.
I will defend your right to have an opinion, just please get educated. Thanks.
“But yes, we need Solaris, Irix, Aix, we actually need as much Unix as we can get. What we really need is to remove Windows from the current ecosystem.”
I couldn’t help myself here…so I have to ask..why do we have to remove Windows??
Did you get fired from Microsoft or something? Was Melinda your girl back in the day, what? You seem to hate Microsoft, and I really do not know why. Are you a Deacon in the church of Stallman?
Sun open sourced theirs years ago…
http://gridengine.sunsource.net/