On 10/28/18, 6:42 PM, "Linux on 390 Port on behalf of Harder, Pieter" <[email protected] on behalf of [email protected]> wrote: > In the past IBM has been extremely reluctant to outright own a Linux distro. > Likely for fear of alienating the Linux people by corporate behaviour. Why > now?
My guess is that Red Hat probably is the most culturally compatible of the Linux distributors to IBM, and Red Hat's customer base overlaps the traditional IBM customer base to a great degree, so the retraining of salespeople would be minimal. It would be a smaller task to adapt IBM sales to the enterprise engagement and license model that Red Hat has traditionally used, and most of those traditional IBM customers preferred Red Hat because they didn't have to think about it too much because it was like all their other software license agreements. It's actually quite clever in that it extends the old, profitable model of enterprise hardware support and services that keeps the lights on at IBM and still buys them a seat at the cloud fantasy table with the kind of big guns IBM is used to having. Gives them a whole bunch of new customers to mine, plus a place back at the strategic center of a lot of old ones. HPE's hardware division would be another smart acquisition, particularly the Tandem stuff, and all of the VMS bits and bobs. There's a lot of possibility with something like zVMS. Hmm.... If you think about it, IBM's been trying to get credibility in the cloud market for a long time, and has pretty much failed to do so at most turns. If you can't beat em, buy them. Presto, cloud success, and all the higher-ups clock their bonuses. Wash, rinse, repeat. This finally relieves the development side of IBM from having to reinvent stuff that's already been done in the Linux world for ages, in a way that will maintain the legal fiction of control that their whole licensing model is based on. A lot of progress can be made quickly in areas where we don't have to try to bolt useful stuff onto the CMS and z/OS ways of doing things, and to get simple things like multitasking and proper process control. I'd expect a lot of the constraints on Linux-based appliances for z/VM will be lifted, although the 7 dwarves case may still restrict them to shipping assemble-it-yourself kits so that no one can claim a shutout of the other distributors. IBM can ship a minimal environment that works for the purpose, and if you have a full Linux distribution, goodie for you - kind of like GCS. I bet there is great rubbing of hands in Somers this evening - no new wheels invented; see the new world, same as the old world. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For more information on Linux on System z, visit http://wiki.linuxvm.org/
