{"id":7298,"date":"2019-01-08T04:57:54","date_gmt":"2019-01-08T04:57:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.appservgrid.com\/paw92\/?p=7298"},"modified":"2019-01-08T13:30:30","modified_gmt":"2019-01-08T13:30:30","slug":"ibm-began-buying-red-hat-20-years-ago","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.appservgrid.com\/paw92\/index.php\/2019\/01\/08\/ibm-began-buying-red-hat-20-years-ago\/","title":{"rendered":"IBM Began Buying Red Hat 20 Years Ago"},"content":{"rendered":"

How Big Blue became an open-source company.<\/em><\/p>\n

News that IBM
\nis buying Red Hat<\/a> is, of course, a significant moment for the
\nworld of free software. It’s further proof, as if any were needed,
\nthat open source has won, and that even the mighty Big Blue must
\nmake its obeisance. Admittedly, the company is not quite the
\nbehemoth it was back in the 20th century, when “nobody
\never got fired for buying IBM<\/a>“. But it remains a benchmark for
\nserious, mainstream\u2014and yes, slightly boring\u2014computing. Its
\nacquisition of Red Hat for the not inconsiderable sum of $34 billion,
\ntherefore, proves that selling free stuff is now regarded as a
\ncompletely normal business model, acknowledged by even the most
\nconservative corporations.<\/p>\n

Many interesting analyses have been and will be written about why
\nIBM bought Red Hat, and what it means for open source, Red Hat,
\nUbuntu, cloud computing, IBM, Microsoft and Amazon, amongst other
\nthings. But one aspect of the deal people may have missed is
\nthat in an important sense, IBM actually began buying Red Hat 20
\nyears ago. After all, $34 billion acquisitions do not spring
\nfully formed out of nowhere. Reaching the point where IBM’s
\nmanagement agreed it was the right thing to do required a journey.
\nAnd, it was a particularly drawn-out and difficult journey, given IBM’s
\nstarting point not just as the embodiment of traditional proprietary
\ncomputing, but its very inventor.<\/p>\n

Even the longest journey begins with a single step, and for IBM, it
\nwas taken on June 22, 1998. On that day, IBM announced it
\nwould ship the Apache web server with the IBM WebSphere Application
\nServer, a key component of its WebSphere product family. Moreover,
\nin an unprecedented move for the company, it would offer “commercial,
\nenterprise-level support” for that free software.<\/p>\n

When I was writing my book Rebel
\nCode: inside Linux and the open source revolution<\/a><\/em> in 2000, I
\nhad the good fortune to interview the key IBM employees who made
\nthat happen. The events of two years before still were fresh in
\ntheir minds, and they explained to me why they decided to push IBM
\ntoward the bold strategy of adopting free software, which ultimately
\nled to the company buying Red Hat 20 years later.<\/p>\n

One of those people was James Barry, who was brought in to look at IBM’s lineup in
\nthe web server sector. He found a mess there; IBM had around 50
\nproducts at the time. During his evaluation of IBM’s strategy, he
\nrealized the central nature of the web server to all the other
\nproducts. At that time, IBM’s offering was Internet Connection
\nServer, later re-branded to Domino Go. The problem was that IBM’s
\nweb server held just 0.2% of the market; 90% of web servers came
\nfrom Netscape (the first internet company, best known for its
\nbrowser), Microsoft and Apache. Negligible market share meant it
\nwas difficult and expensive to find staff who were trained to use
\nIBM’s solution. That, in its turn, meant it was hard to sell IBM’s
\nWebSphere product line.<\/p>\n

Barry, therefore, realized that IBM needed to adopt one of the
\nmainstream web servers. IBM talked about buying Netscape. Had
\nthat happened, the history of open source would have been very
\ndifferent. As part of IBM, Netscape probably would not have released
\nits browser code as the free software that became Mozilla. No
\nMozilla would have meant no Firefox, with all the knock-on effects
\nthat implies. But for various reasons, the idea of buying Netscape
\ndidn’t work out. Since Microsoft was too expensive to acquire,
\nthat left only one possibility: Apache.<\/p>\n

For Barry, coming to that realization was easy. The hard part was
\nconvincing the rest of IBM that it was the right thing to do. He tried
\ntwice, unsuccessfully, to get his proposal adopted. Barry succeeded
\non the third occasion, in part because he teamed up with someone
\nelse at IBM who had independently come to the conclusion that Apache
\nwas the way forward for the company.<\/p>\n

Shan Yen-Ping was working on IBM’s e-business strategy in 1998 and,
\nlike Barry, realized that the web server was key in this space.
\nDitching IBM’s own software in favor of open source was likely to
\nbe a traumatic experience for the company’s engineers, who had
\ninvested so much in their own code. Shan’s idea to request his
\nsenior developers to analyze Apache in detail proved key to winning
\ntheir support. Shan says that when they started to dig deep into
\nthe code, they were surprised by the elegance of the architecture.
\nAs engineers, they had to admit that the open-source project was
\nproducing high-quality software. To cement that view, Shan asked
\nBrian Behlendof, one of the creators and leaders of the Apache
\nproject, to come in and talk with IBM’s top web server architects.
\nThey too were impressed by him and his team’s work. With the quality
\nof Apache established, it was easier to win over IBM’s developers
\nfor the move.<\/p>\n

Shortly after the announcement that IBM would be adopting Apache
\nas its web server, the company took another small but key step
\ntoward embracing open source more widely. It involved the Jikes Java compiler<\/a> that
\nhad been written by two of IBM’s researchers: Philippe Charles and
\nDave Shields. After a binary version of the program for GNU\/Linux
\nwas released in July 1998, Shields started receiving requests for
\nthe source code. For IBM to provide access to the underlying code
\nwas unprecedented, but Shields said he would try to persuade his
\nbosses that it would be a good move for the company.<\/p>\n

A Jikes user suggested he should talk to Brian Behlendorf, who put
\nhim in touch with James Barry. IBM’s recent adoption of Apache
\npaved the way for Shield’s own efforts to release the company’s
\ncode as open source. Shields wrote his proposal in August 1998,
\nand it was accepted in September. The hardest part was not convincing
\nmanagement, but drawing up an open-source license. Shields said
\nthis involved “research attorneys, the attorneys at the software
\ndivision who dealt with Java, the trademark attorneys, patents
\nattorneys, contract attorneys”. Everyone involved was aware that
\nthey were writing IBM’s first open-source license, so getting
\nit right was vital. In fact, the original Jikes license of December
\n1998 was later generalized into the IBM Public License in June 1999.
\nIt was a key moment, because it made releasing more IBM code as
\nopen source much easier, smoothing the way for the company’s
\ncontinuing march into the world of free software.<\/p>\n

Barry described IBM as being like “a big elephant: very, very
\ndifficult to move an inch, but if you point the elephant toward the
\nright direction and get it moving, it’s also very difficult to stop
\nit.” The final nudge that set IBM moving inexorably toward the
\nembrace of open source occurred on January, 10, 2000, when the company
\nannounced that it would make all of its server platforms “Linux-friendly”,
\nincluding the S\/390 mainframe, the AS\/400 minicomputer and the
\nRS\/6000 workstation. IBM was supporting GNU\/Linux across its entire
\nhardware range\u2014a massive vote of confidence in freely available
\nsoftware written by a distributed community of coders.<\/p>\n

The man who was appointed at the time as what amounted to a Linux
\nTsar for the company, Irving
\nWladawsky-Berger<\/a>, said that there were three main strands to
\nthat historic decision. One was simply that GNU\/Linux was a platform
\nwith a significant market share in the UNIX sector. Another was
\nthe early use of GNU\/Linux by the supercomputing community\u2014something
\nthat eventually led to every single one of
\nthe world’s top 500 supercomputers<\/a> running some form of Linux
\ntoday.<\/em><\/p>\n

The third strand of thinking within IBM is perhaps the most
\ninteresting. Wladawsky-Berger pointed out how the rise of TCP\/IP
\nas the de facto standard for networking had made interconnection
\neasy, and powered the rise of the internet and its astonishing
\nexpansion. People within IBM realized that GNU\/Linux could do the
\nsame for application development. As he told me back in 2000:<\/p>\n

The whole notion separating application development
\nfrom the underlying deployment platform has been a Holy Grail of
\nthe industry because it would all of the sudden unshackle the
\napplication developers from worrying about all that plumbing. I
\nthink with Linux we now have the best opportunity to do that. The
\nfact that it’s not owned by any one company, and that it’s open
\nsource, is a huge part of what enables us to do that. If the answer
\nhad been, well, IBM has invented a new operating system, let’s get
\neverybody in the world to adopt it, you can imagine how far that
\nwould go with our competitors.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Far from inventing a “new operating system”, with its purchase of
\nRed Hat, IBM has now fully embraced the only one matters any more\u2014GNU\/Linux. In doing so, it confirms Wladawsky-Berger’s prescient
\nanalysis and completes that fascinating journey the company began
\nall those years ago.<\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How Big Blue became an open-source company. News that IBM is buying Red Hat is, of course, a significant moment for the world of free software. It’s further proof, as if any were needed, that open source has won, and that even the mighty Big Blue must make its obeisance. Admittedly, the company is not … <\/p>\n

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