On Sat, Jul 3, 2010 at 11:45 AM, Kenneth Gonsalves <[email protected]> wrote: > On Saturday 03 July 2010 11:26:27 Rahul Sundaram wrote: >> > On Friday 02 July 2010 16:20:43 Balaji Damodaran wrote: >> >> It was surprising that no one is flaming IBM yet. They're not so >> >> friendly to opensource either >> > >> > pure FUD - IBM has made available a huge amount of code as open source >> > and there are huge resources built and maintained by IBM to support open >> > source. >> >> It is not as black and white however. For example, they hold the >> largest number of software patents in the world and continue to strongly >> lobby for expanding the scope of patenting in the world. They even >> argued to the Supreme court in US that software patents benefit free and >> open source software. >> > > nothing is black and white - take yahoo!, they contribute their satellite > images freely to openstreetmap, release a lot of the code they write into open > source and happily patent a lot of software. There is an old english proverb > 'he who lives in a glass house should undress in the dark'. If we apply the > principle of only black and white, very few if anyone on this list qualifies > to > be here. (certainly I do not). But let us be reasonable - there is a huge > amount of 'white' in IBM which is thus much higher on the side of the good > guys than microsoft. Of course Redhat is almost pure white on the scale.
To give credit to IBM, they made eclipse fully open sourced. They fund a lot of Linux and java-based opensource projects. More particularly they funded CouchDB, which was developed by Damien Katz, ex-IBM employee who worked on Lotus Notes team which is a similar document based DB. They have a list of projects to which they claim that they're contributing: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/views/opensource/projects.jsp But, lets not be blatant in embracing IBM as the good guys shall we. As Rahul pointed out, IBM has more patents than any other software company in the world and they do use that patents against open source projects: http://www.computerworlduk.com/community/blogs/index.cfm?entryid=2891&blogid=14 http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2010/04/ibm-breaks-taboo-and-betrays-its.html Any guess why they threatened that particular open source project?: Because the project is a *mainframe* emulator. I can argue that IBM going open source is only a tactical business decision to oust Microsoft and Sun (now Oracle) in the enterprise space. --> http://www.zdnet.com/news/open-source-ibms-deadly-weapon/296366 , but it is a no-brainer isn't it. My point is not "don't just hate Microsoft, hate IBM too" - It is to be diligent in whom we consider as good, and whom we consider as evil for FOSS and always be wary of big corporate companies and their hidden agenda. > > let people who use fully free software on their mobiles, who do not touch > google apps, who only use non-patented hardware flame IBM. Let the rest of us > keep our peace. > -- > regards > kg > http://lawgon.livejournal.com/ > _______________________________________________ > ILUGC Mailing List: > http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc > _______________________________________________ ILUGC Mailing List: http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc
