On Mon, 29 Oct 2018, Tony Brian Albers wrote:
I've worked for Big Blue, and I'm not sure the company cultures are compatible to say the least.
I think it will be all right (and yes, look, I'm alive, I'm alive!). IBM has been a long term supporter of Linux -- ever since Microsoft screwed them as they were supposedly co-developing OS/2. They were a primary sponsor of the "Extreme Linux" (beowulf) booth at the Linux Expo held (damn!) almost twenty years ago in Raleigh that I helped organize, and literally contributed a ready to run beowulf cluster to run in the booth in addition to lots of other stuff -- humans to help out, some money, etc. IBM's primary outward directed culture is white collar because that's what sells, but its backroom culture has a strong geek component. They are also not completely clueless about the open source world -- if anything, that is the motivation for the purchase. My larger concern is for side stuff. RH is complex (necessarily) and internally is almost as white collar as IBM on the outside because again, that's what corporate clients want, and consequently RHEL plods along with only a tiny fraction of what is out there for Linux in general. Fedora is its bleeding edge (and at that, probably a bit behind e.g. Debian). If IBM decides Fedora is a waste of money and cuts support for the enormously complex churn of application development and maintenance (the latter being a very, very serious issue in open source software, as sooner or later original developers do stuff like get old and die, get bored and do something else, or get overtaken by cheeky youngsters who pointlessly rename something (yum -> dnf, anyone?) and then yank it around) and somehow manages to block CENTOS -- mixing in more proprietary stuff, for example so that CENTOS is basically cut off from the development stream of key new packages -- then the free software world we live in will get nastier and less stable. HOPEFULLY they will announce as formal policy their intention to continue full support for Fedora as their own primary linuxoid development and debugging line (as it is mostly irrelevant to their corporate targets and really is key to keeping things "alive" instead of developmentally frozen) and to continue to at the very least not obstruct CENTOS and RHEL-derived linuces (Scientific Linux?). The one thing I'm very hopeful about is that they continue to oppose the Evil Empire, and don't let them corrupt the OSS world with Microsoft proprietary hooks that destroy the ability of Linux in general to function as "the" top to bottom platform supporting everything from personal devices as Android to cloud servers to beowulfish clusters to personal laptops and desktops. IBM has a very long corporate memory, and I'm quite certain that they'd love to do to M$ what M$ did to them lo those many years ago. rg(I'm not dead yet!)b
/tony -- --? Tony Albers Systems Architect Systems Director, National Cultural Heritage Cluster Royal Danish Library, Victor Albecks Vej 1, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark. Tel: +45 2566 2383 / +45 8946 2316 _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.beowulf.org_mailman_listinfo_beowulf&d=DwIGaQ&c=imBPVzF25OnBgGmVOlcsiEgHoG1i6YHLR0Sj_gZ4adc&r=VjN6W5gT-iXGupU3t6I7tA&m=WKxO312tLTrlB745V1Oh5Oe03a4UdGkmbk5aBZOk46M&s=VwJNSYjaK4T4IS6KrYeWRny98SL_LqdCclXuIF_kN1g&e=
Robert G. Brown http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/ Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305 Durham, N.C. 27708-0305 Phone: 1-919-660-2567 Fax: 919-660-2525 email:r...@phy.duke.edu _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
