[CS-FSLUG] Comments on Sam Palmisano of IBM
N. Thompson
n.thomp at sasktel.net
Sun Feb 13 20:39:01 CST 2005
On February 13, 2005 05:15 pm, Bradly McConnell wrote:
> Greetings All,
>
> Well I just wanted to poll the group and see if anyone has an opinion
> about Sam Palmisano or Lous Gerstner of IBM, mainly focusing on Sam.
> Since he has been the driving force for IBM's move toward Linux, I
> just wanted to see what you guys have to say.
>
> I'm writing a paper on his main initiatives that are in place in an
> attempt to bring IBM back in good favor. I didn't pick the paper, but
> I do see it as a slight opportunity to play Linux advocate to a very
> M$ embedded school. Which that is an issue upon itself, and I'm
> transferring to another school for Fall '05. They won't even
> acknowledge the existance of Firefox, OpenOffice, or anything "not
> Microsoft" other than SPSS statistics software, which of course is
> another very high dollar suite.
>
> What I'm mainly looking for is the general attitude towards IBM from
> the Linux/Open Source community with their recent changes focusing on
> services and software instead of big clunky iron.
I heard that prior to Microsoft being the bad guys, IBM was the much hated
immoral monopoly; however, I wasn't around way back when these things
supposedly happened so IBM has a fairly clean slate with me.
I can't help but wonder whether or not IBM is planning to make a Linux
distribution of its own or purchase one of the existing ones and put their
deep pockets full of cash behind it. IBM claims to be very pro-Linux and in
support of the OSS movement, so I was hoping that they would do more than put
some word of mouth behind the entire thing and actually invest in improving
the product.
Red Hat, Mandrake and Novell all make usable alternatives to Windows but none
of them are getting ahead of it where it matters to home users. In SUSE Linux
for example Konqueror doesn't updates its contents when a file in the
currently open folder is changed, in fact it almost frequently crashes.
Novell isn't the only one that isn't putting together a well polished
distribution either; all the distributions I can think of right now have
significant bugs which aren't critical but do make the entire operating
system seem unpolished and make Windows user laugh at what we claim to be the
future. I believe that these mistakes are because most of those companies
don't have the funds to improve the software to the needed extent, IBM on the
other hand has deep pockets from what I've heard so they have a great
advantage that cannot be matched even by Red Hat.
If I'm not misinformed IBM wanted to make a mainstream operating system once
when they partnered with Microsoft to make OS/2, right now they have an
apportunity that is unparallelled. IBM has the cash to hire on professional
developers and software designers to improve the existing software and put
together new applications that will make Linux more user friendly than
Windows while maintaining all its advantages. What IBM has right now is more
resources than any other company I know of that's making a Linux
distribution, with that they could easily rise to the challenge of taking
Linux to new heights so how come the only think I've ever seen them do for
Linux is advertise it on TV sometimes, and occasionally make some of their
programs open source?
If IBM is already doing these things than I want to hear about it, I've been
waiting for a long time to have a distribution polished enough that Windows
users will take one look at it and at least consider it. I know I'm going to
get in hot water for mentioning these here but who amongst you list members
can honestly say that GNU/Linux is 100% better than Windows or Mac OS X when
it still has rough edges hidden behind all that eye candy and neat software.
Furthermore, who amongst you list members can say that Linux wouldn't benefit
from from a prosperous company investing in the operating system's future
with not only money but professionally written code and bug fixes?
--
http://celerate.blogspot.com/
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