Tyler wrote: “IBM’s bureaucracy places a fundamental orientation toward being commercial- and a patent-first mindset towards software innovation. While IBM has participated in significant open source projects, it’s always been with a me-first mindset that works to exploit the positive advances of the open source upstream community. Open source, at its core, advances when the commercial vendors that participate do so in a manner that shows selflessness by investing in the upstream’s goals, even if those goals conflict with the commercial interests of the vendor.”
This is simply not true. IBM has a whole team of developers completely independent of product influence that contribute to the growth and innovation of many communities. When a project is of strategic interest to IBM, we engage to ensure the long-term sustainability of the project — we do not do so for purely selfish interest (although, if you are taking on a strategic dependency, its long-term sustainability is definitely a self-serving interest that happens to be shared by the entire community and ecosystem).
As for the clause: “There will be no form of retribution and limited management oversight.” as IBM CTO for Open Tech, we have no policy that ensures that developers work exclusively in the company’s interests. My team routinely makes contributions that in fact could be perceived by the product teams as not in the interests of the products. They have freedom to engage as they see best fit. In fact, we go to lengths to ensure that the mentality you ascribe to IBM is NOT reflected in our upstream efforts, and we also go to lengths to ensure that the ecosystem that grows around the project is a thriving one with multiple beneficiaries, vendors and consumers alike.
Does IBM influence the direction of strategic projects? I should hope so. Open source is not necessarily about helter-skelter innovation for innovation’s sake. It is also about delivering value that technology consumers (whether of FOSS components or products that implement same). That requires a certain maturity of the community. Open source does not develop itself, and even Red Hat makes considerable revenue on the projects in which their engineers engage. If you believe that their kernel developers are not influenced by the needs of RHEL, I have a bridge to sell you.
As for “IBM will kill the Linux spirit that lives within Red Hat” — what complete nonsense. IBM has been contributing to Linux and the many projects that run on that platform longer than just about any other. We helped make Linux a thing in the enterprise. We have continued to fund a large number of OSS developers to the Linux kernel for almost two decades. All our software runs on Linux, and most enterprise customers prefer RHEL for its maturity and support model. Why on earth would we kill the goose that lays the golden eggs?
To claim this will be a loss for Java is laughable. I’m not sure why I am continuing to read this.
“potentially damaging for customers if IBM moves Red Hat toward their traditional closed and proprietary model.” — what a ridiculous, baseless statement.
I can appreciate that you want to paint WS02 in a positive light, but you really shouldn’t need to make baseless claims about your competitors to do so.
