Actually, System z (mainframes) still accounts for a quarter of IBM's revenue and about half of its profits. [1] At least, that was the case in 2012. I suspect that hasn't changed much with IBM's recent announcement of the LinuxONE. In fact, IBM contributed significant effort get Node.js (and thereby V8) ported to s390x. [2]
[1]: http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2012/09/ibms-mainf... [2]: http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2012/09/ibms-mainf...
I'm sure we'll be hearing the same crap in a decade while said crap is posted via a service that imtegrates with a COBOL app on a mainframe. ;)
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD05xx/E...
Your quip reminded me of the above quote from Dijkstra!
Linux OpenStack Cloud Foundry Docker plus many Apache projects like Spark, Cordova and Hadoop and of course, Node
They are? (keyword => "leading")
https://github.com/docker/docker/graphs/contributors
https://github.com/apache/spark/graphs/contributors
I find this claim dubious. Maybe I'm not digging hard enough.
There's an article here: http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/15/ibm-pours-researchers-and-r...
disclosure: I run partnerships for Docker.
Some of these augmentations have been contributed back to the main projects.
IBM has a lot of working engineers at Cloud Foundry HQ in San Francisco. Last I checked IBM-CFers were the whole CLI team and they're doing great.
The problem here is the audience is clearly the developer community (which I'm also a part of). Developer communities have a right be skeptical about key acquisitions of their open source dependancies. It can have massive commercial implications on software design decisions, etc.
Open source is built on trust. Dubious communication does nothing but erode that trust.
Not sure about the US laws, but here in Germany, all marketing claims must stay to the facts, or the company can be sued.
(Which is why most marketing speak uses fuzzy terms that sound nice but don't convey any information. But that's a general trend anyway.)
IBM has long embraced the OSS community (I loved LTC), but the process to release/use anything OSS was not good (to put it nicely) and was one of the many reasons I left.
I worked on a project that was on an island, and while it was more efficient than normal IBM dev, it was still 10x slower and tons of red tape then what was required to make a competitive product (and stay competitive). IBM is big and ultimately has to protect themselves - IMO ultimately it gets in your way of making a good/competitive product.
I like what StrongLoop does for the node community, and I do indeed hope you are successful and nothing changes. But to be honest I am very skeptical.
The process to get a new blade installed in one of our chassis took 6 months.
Based on all my experience, they are slow and expensive, and over-build their teams. They do deliver the final product and it will work, which is why people hire them, but they do not do it efficiently.
You can see some details about their open source contributions here: http://www-03.ibm.com/linux/ossstds/oss/ossindex.html
Softlayer and Netezza in different ways were smart, nimble and fearless companies. You had real relationships with the engineers. I got to know Netezza folks in Massachusetts, Poland and Australia - some of the smartest folks I've met. They shared scripts and passionate expertise.
IBM took it over and the bureaucracy set in. The term "TAM" brings tears of rage to my eyes... Opening a support ticket is about as hard as applying for a mortgage online. And they want to have these endless conference calls with 7 or 8 folks from their side. And nothing gets done.
I am embarrassed about the way I have acted on these calls. I have called folks out and out liars. I have screamed at and bashed conference phones.
Maybe it would have been better if I hadn't known the Netezza folks - they were good.
And Softlayer...
I used to be able to call a guy down in texas and after a 20 minute phone call have a cluster of servers ordered. Once did a hadoop cluster this way. Go off and have lunch come back and the servers would we ready by the afternoon.
And now: 2 major outages in the past 2 months. No communication - in both cases entirely their fault. Power failure and network misconfig causing an arp storm. Ignored for hours while we submitted tickets and called support... Nightmare.
And an absurd situation where their security dept threatened us with taking an haproxy server offline due to a clean-mx false positive - even after the tireless guy running clean-mx emailed to that effect...
It became apparent in the discussions following this event that the TAM and sales support which has had our account for years, knew nothing about our business.
Just horrible bureacracy and bad service.
So I have had really negative experiences with 2 IBM acquired companies. Hopefully it will be better for StrongLoop.
For anyone affected - watch for the good folks shedding off.
However, the cash injection made the core product worlds better, and it was good to begin with. Support got worse, the product got better. It's almost an even balance.
It is a race to pass the buck.
Acquisitions are thoroughly NDA'd. A few of the core team may have been told (but relationships are not universally cordial - recall that Strongloop and Nodesource are direct competitors). The io.js community in general was absolutely not told.
I expect there are a few people who feel a bit betrayed that one of the major movers in a supposed grass-roots community-oriented fork appears to have done it only to make themselves a better acquisition target.
While they're not wrong to feel that way, StrongLoop have been telegraphing this particular intention for a long time (at least since hiring Roth).
"IBM has identified Node.js as an important part of the future of enterprise middleware and StrongLoop’s technology and expertise as pivotal to their strategy to help companies fully unlock the value of their existing IT investments and legacy data with APIs."
Sucks that IBM has this effect. If they didn't, esp if had opposite effect, they could be the biggest and most awesome tech company in existence.
As much as I like the power/openness of npm, a lot of corporate environments move more slowly... modules need to be cleared by legal and usually limited to specific versions. Having more resources to do this is a good thing and can only help people who are working for financial institutions (as an example).
Now they acquired another heavy weight in the js world, I wonder what is their next step.
On a side note, to the audience: have you looked at node-red, what do you think of it?
[0]: http://nodered.org/ [1]: http://www.ti.com/sensortag
ps. if you run node-red locally note by default it is insecure, you need to setup the config. But really it is a must try!
As much as I like to think I have chosen Node.js purely for its merits, having a wide community who adopts a platform brings a few perks:
- Hiring developers requires less of a gamble on their part. Elixir looks very promising and probably has a lot of advantages over Node.js thanks to it's Erlang foundation but it makes it harder to assemble a team—I hope this changes as I wish the Erlang/Elixir folks all the best.
- There is a great amount of wealth contained in the package repository NPM. Before Node.js, this was a great strength of Perl's CPAN (and TeX' CTAN before that).
- Having large organizations adopt a platform will eventually increase OSS contributions.
I could be mistaken but I don't see Node.js following the bureaucratic of Java's JSR if it continues to adopt a lean and mean approach akin to UNIX tools (do 1 thing well).
BlueMix is a Cloud Foundry installation. Is there a separate BlueMix-specific thing that is distinct from the Node.js buildpack?[0]
IBM develops products that it acquires based on where IBM needs the product to go. Sometimes that matches where the user community wants it to go, sometimes it does not. But they will put resources behind it, and it will change - we just need to give it time to see what direction that change takes things.
I learnt Python from "Dive Into Python 3", but that hasn't been updated for few years now. Any similar book with recent updates?
