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