IBM Not Threatened by Sun's Novell Claim
August 9, 2004 1 Comment
It comes as no surprise to me that IBM is not threatened. Why would they be. From the article: “Now that [Red Hat Inc. is] supporting an application server, IBM now finds Red Hat competing against it,” said Schwartz in an interview, referring to Red Hat's J2EE (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition) application server, which was announced here last week at the LinuxWorld conference.
“What would happen if Sun decided to acquire Novell? What would IBM do?” Schwartz asked. “If Red Hat is competing with them, they are left with only one choice: Novell SuSE Linux. Sun could then end up as the owner of the operating system that runs IBM's mainframe. Wouldn't that be an interesting scenario?”
It seems John gets it about as much as Scott did. He seems to miss that the “operating system that runs IBM's mainframe” would still be Linux (among others), not Novell. Linux virtually assures there will be no vendor lockin, which is one of it's great strengths. Given the relative sizes on the companies involved though, his message is still quite lost. IBM supports Oracle running on their hardware, and Oracle competes directly with DB2. Regardless of what Linux you put on an IBM mainframe, they still sold the hardware. They get money no matter what distro you choose. That's why they like Linux. ..and that says nothing about that fact that, in a pinch, IBM could acquire Red Hat, or a myriad other Linux distro's to take up the Slack. When will Sun learn…or better yet – will they?
–jeremy
Jeremy's Blog 
I have to agree with you on this one 100%. I think that there's some stinky stuff being smoked in the top floor office! IBM doesn't have much to worry about as far as OS support. I'm sure that if the company can develop its own JDK/JRE, then there's no reason why Linux can't be maintained and developed “in house”, since the company has already contributed a lot of technology and research to Linux.
Of course there is nothing to stop IBM from using Debian (or Progeny, since it seems that's what P is gearing towards anyways – a big contract like one from IBM would be tops). Perhaps Mandrake Linux would be a good option as well. Its becoming quite a robust solution for many. If they keep the mirror tree in one place long enough for a company to become confident in the Mandrake offerings, they'd be a viable partner as well.