Also note that IBM contributions to Linux kernel in 2000, was one of the reasons it actually took off.
Linux's multiprocessor support was ...lackluster at best... prior to IBM contributing all the Sequent (Dynix) derived multiprocessing stuff. Hyperthreading/Multicore started to get "normal" even in consumer systems only a couple years later, so that injection was pretty critical.
Likewise, a lot of Linux's development inertia and cultural acceptance came from being a cheap and consistent alternative to screwing around with the profusion of expensive and mutually incompatible proprietary Unixes in the Server and (as clusters co-evolved) HPC market.
On the broader issue, the tension here is that IBM thinks the value proposition of RHEL is "Supported" and (I suspect) almost everyone else regards the value proposition of RHEL as "standard base." I think it's more likely that the "standard base" for srs bsns Linux in the markets where RHEL is the standard would rebase than IBM having any success trying to squeeze customers, and if that happens the value of "Owning RHEL" suddenly shrinks dramatically. Honestly, all it would take is the RHEL-likes like Alma and Rocky to agree on a coordination mechanism that isn't matching RHEL - could be through a major public interest like CERN, could be through an existing commercial interest like coordinating with Oracle (ew), could be via one of the several entities that does commercial support for RHEL-likes ... there are options.
Oracle being a gigantic litigious parasite on society is a broader issue, and I understand regarding commercial RHEL-likes as more of a problem, but even they have been funding a lot of backport-to-LTS type work.
It was certainly needed over time but capabilities from things like RCU out of Sequent weren't that important in the 2000 timeframe. And a lot of IBM's contributions didn't come online until the v4 kernel.
None of this is to minimize IBM's contributions to Linux over time but I'd argue pretty strongly that IBM's endorsement of Linux for enterprises in January 2000 is what really moved the needle in the short run.
Here's what one of the people most directly involved told me a few years ago:
"By the late 90s, it was clear that Linux was becoming more and more important. And we formed a major task force to see to what extent IBM should embrace Linux and this happened in 1999. And the task force came back and said, we absolutely should embrace Linux, that it was going to be an incredibly important part of computing, that we should embrace Linux across all of IBM's offerings. And that IBM should become a major supporter of Linux.
"And I still remember very well in December of ‘99, I called Sam Palmisano, the head of IBM Systems Group. And I said, Sam, the task force recommends that we should embrace Linux. And Sam said, okay, Irving, we will do that. But you have to now come over and run an IBM Linux initiative. And I said to Sam, okay, we were pretty much done with our internet strategy. So I was no longer needed to run the Internet division And I said to Sam, when do you want to announce it? And Sam said, how about now? And I said Sam. It's the Christmas holidays. Maybe we should wait until the new year. And in the second week of January of 2000, we made a major announcement saying that IBM would embrace Linux across all of these offerings. And in fact, later that month in January of 2000, I gave a keynote at LinuxWorld, which was taking place in the Javits Center in New York City, about IBM’s Linux initiative.
"At some level, the rest is history."
But in 1999, IBM ported Linux to run on System 390 (https://slashdot.org/index2.pl?fhfilter=mainframe+linux) and I remember there was a story that some IBM scientist booted more than 30,000 Linux instances on a mainframe on his lunch break. This research led to the big SUSE partnership, as well as open-sourcing other enterprise-y software like JFS and putting a big devteam to make the kernel ready for real SMP (Linux didn't have efficient+mature SMP even into the early aughts, although a few companies had built some massive SMP boxes.)
Including IBM. (Forget when they did their big stackable X-series server.) A lot of the tech eventually became applicable to even super-mainstream dual-socket servers but I wonder how much money was largely wasted on building and trying to sell larger scale-up boxes.
But, yeah, IBM was one of the big investors in OSDL (and their own Linux Technology Center) which had a lot of scale-up focus which made a lot of the legal claims of another 3-letter company pretty much misaligned with the timeline.
Okay? Do you feel attacked because I wrote something negative about IBM? Not sure how that is relevant to my point.
> Also note that IBM contributions to Linux kernel in 2000, was one of the reasons it actually took off.
And that influences the motivations behind their current decisions how exactly?
HN loves to hate Oracle, IBM, SAP, Adobe and friends, without getting the point that many startups that go through HN programs never achieve half of what they produce.
That alone looks quite alright for a dying company.
And we see what IBM has done with leadership in those areas, as well as a long line of other areas where they somehow managed to turn themselves into a 3rd rate competitor despite being in the right place at the right time.
So, you have to ask yourself, for example how its possible that people are falling over themselves to build a RISCv ecosystem from the ground up, when openpower has been around for a decade now, and IBMs been looking for partners there since the original AIM alliance.
IBM is still in business because they can build on massive reserves from the time where they literally created the market for commercial computing. That was indeed influential. Now they slowly burn those reserves and have a crackhead sales team that knows how to sell mainframes and subsequently suck those customers dry.
The new generation of graduates has no idea what IBM does, let alone what a mainframe is. New talent for maintaining Cobol codebases is so rare to come by, that they pay the Linux foundation to offer free courses on Cobol.
IBM's success is a relict of the past. It will die when the last guy that knows how to maintain Cobol dies. Good riddance.
That was quarter a century ago.
