IBM Eye

Much has been made by myself as well as others, about IBM’s open arm embrace of open source software. A great article at preens.com notes the oddity in the following way: IBM, the epitome of conservative business, de-emphasizes its billion-dollar “AIX” operating system in favor of a product developed by a loose coalition of programmers with no financial motive in common, upon whom no corporate directive can be binding, whose leader has no power but the respect of others.

This week there have been a number of fine articles I’ve seen attempting to describe the business benefit of such a move. Later in that same article,it states:

Examples of this sort of company are IBM and HP. Hardware is a great product to sell along with Open Source software. It costs a penny to copy software, but you can’t copy a loaf of bread without a pound of flour. Until we have the Star Trek “replicator”[13], hardware is a difficult-to-copy product. Allowing the customer to know something of hardware internals doesn’t necessarily remove all of its business differentiation, as might be the case for software. The hardware manufacturers that participate in Open Source development do so to enable sales of their hardware products. Hardware is useless without software, and specifically computers are useless without the operating system that interfaces the computer hardware to software applications. Open Source developers seem to be better at systems programming than any other form of programming, so far, and the Linux operating system kernel is now as good as, or better than, many proprietary operating systems for similar hardware. Hardware manufacturers formerly spent billions on proprietary operating systems that, for them, were always enabling technology rather than a profit-center. The margins were in the hardware itself. Many of these manufacturers have eagerly embraced Linux because it allows them to distribute the cost and risk of the operating system among multiple companies, has a cost-efficiency greater than that of similar proprietary operating systems, and is in general desirable to the customer.

I found that interesting, and valid from an academic perspective (an easy classroom example) but not accurate in describing IBM’s motives. IBM, I believe is far more interested in the thought leadership, goodwill and most of all the major money they make from implementation, middleware and services like implementation, maintenance and the like related to the expertise and possibilities created by the free software. I don’t think IBM sees this as a value added throw-in for their hardware. That would be true even if they were an open source parasite, passively reaping the benefits of others.

There’s some good debate over at slashdot about Open Source monetization that is interesting but not directly about IBM

There was a blog post complaining about IBM stripping functionality out of a blog platform for Lotus that they bought to keep the source code closed. The author laments that IBM is inconsistent in its support for open source.

I was unfamiliar with the software, so I scanned through IBM’s technote on the release to get a feel for how many features were stripped out and why.

IBM listed 5 reasons why they had to make changes:

• remove Open source code
• ease support of the template
• simplify use of the template
• change the user interface to fit in with IBM standards
• make Language translation easier

Of the dozen or so features removed or amended in such a way as to prohibit backwards compatibility, two were admittedly due to open source restrictions:

• Trackback
• Web Rich Text Editor

Of the others, several were purportedly removed because they were little used and would be too much trouble to port the code. I’d probably be disappointed if I’d been using a blog platform that was acquired by a company and then had features stripped from it. To quote from the aforementioned post:

… it’s a compelling illustration, I think, of the fact that IBM is
only going to use open source where IBM deems it strategically useful
for competitive purposes (i.e., to compete with Microsoft).

But to all the activists who are continually trumpeting about how IBM
has embraced open source software, well, guys, it’s not quite as
ideological as you would like people to think. Most of IBM’s code is
proprietary, especially the stuff they think they can make money at,
such as Websphere. If you really look at IBM’s products, they are going
with open source in those cases where they think they can’t win the
competition with Microsoft.

Those are stinging words. It does seem that IBM’s open source initiatives align well with their strongest competitors. One shouldn’t get too idealistic when trumpeting the virtues of a publicly traded company. IBM’s loyalty and commitment necessarily lie in maximizing shareholder’s wealth. Corporate officers get in trouble when they lose site of that. IBM is a benefactor to the open source community but it is necessarily to their own benefit, both in developing in-house expertise and in altering the competitive landscape. Perhaps they
should at least be consistent across all their divisions so as to not deflate the goodwill they build up through billions of dollars in commitment to the open source community. That would keep criticism like this from ringing so true. I guess IBM has made the decision that they
are more profitable long term by keeping some products and systems closed while opening others and embracing open platforms as needed. Profitably trumps technical ideology even if the closed and proprietary systems don’t get trumpeted by the PR dept.