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IBM to invest $100 million in Linux push (News.com)

News.com reports that IBM will invest $100 million in support of Linux desktop applications. "IBM said the decision stemmed from the increasing popularity of Linux among its customers. According to the company, the number of customers opting for the Linux platform for applications such as WebSphere Portal, instant messaging and Web-based document sharing saw high double-digit growth in 2004."
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Where's Notes for Linux?

Posted Feb 18, 2005 15:18 UTC (Fri) by fozzy (guest, #7022) [Link]

These sorts of announcements from IBM always seem a bit hollow - where is the Linux port of the Lotus Notes Client? When I see IBM announce Notes will be available natively for Linux then I'll believe they're serious about the desktop.

(Yes, I know Notes runs fairly well under Wine).

Where's Notes for Linux?

Posted Feb 18, 2005 15:46 UTC (Fri) by josander (guest, #19785) [Link]

Lotus WordPro! :-)

Wordpro was unstable like nitroglycerin, but it's the only thing I really miss from Windows. - Jostein

Where's Notes for Linux?

Posted Feb 21, 2005 8:13 UTC (Mon) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link]

WordPro was unstable like Nitroglycerine? Due to the landmines kindly placed in Windows courtesy of MS?

WordPerfect was the same. And that was almost certainly MS's fault so I can't see WordPro being any different.

Cheers,
Wol

Where's Notes for Linux?

Posted Feb 22, 2005 18:56 UTC (Tue) by XERC (guest, #14626) [Link]

Only an idiot or person under
political pressure writes a non-pahtform-independent
aplication.

By assuming that a company does not
hire idiots, is not under political pressure and
has at least moderately sensible management,
the only reason for a non-existence of a port is that
THEY DON'T WANT TO!!!

Where's Notes for Linux?

Posted Feb 18, 2005 18:49 UTC (Fri) by Ross (subscriber, #4065) [Link]

Or SameTime or LWP or, well, pretty much any client-side Lotus product.

Sometimes they have web or Java versions but they don't work so well. I love
running an IM client which takes 60-100MB of RAM, sometimes goes into swap
storms, leaves random files in my home directory, and deletes its preferences
and user lists on a regular basis. Actually it's kind of annoying.

IBM to invest $100 million in Linux push (News.com)

Posted Feb 18, 2005 15:31 UTC (Fri) by barry (guest, #173) [Link]

You are right about that....Lotus is far behind the curve.

I think that IBM has made some *very* smart moves in the last few years, but also some real bone-headed ones.

IMHO, Lotus should've scooped up the Evolution team that Novell got and released an improved OSS "messaging platform" client that worked with Domino and Exchange. This should be the new "Notes client".

If it was pretty seemless transition from Outlook, many companies would jump on it. Afterall once you have a flexible, open-source front-end -- changing the backend would be much easier.

IBM to invest $100 million in Linux push (News.com)

Posted Feb 18, 2005 15:35 UTC (Fri) by danond (guest, #27986) [Link]

I'm no IBM expert, but has anyone considered that IBM is possibly not
interested in further developing Notes? It's been around a LONG time and
seems to be quite bloated. Lately IBM seems to be leaning more towards
SuSE and Novell lately than Red Hat. I wouldn't be surprised if they're
considering another "push" to help OpenExchange server development.

IBM to invest $100 million in Linux push (News.com)

Posted Feb 24, 2005 12:10 UTC (Thu) by mdekkers (guest, #85) [Link]

funny, that - as Novell is no longer interested in OpenXchange

IBM to invest $100 million in Linux push (News.com)

Posted Feb 18, 2005 16:29 UTC (Fri) by danielpf (subscriber, #4723) [Link]

I would have taken seriously IBM about Linux on desktop if it would have sold its own laptops with Linux preinstalled. This will never occur because IBM will soon stop selling laptops.

IBM to invest $100 million in Linux push (News.com)

Posted Feb 18, 2005 17:19 UTC (Fri) by lduperval (guest, #26644) [Link]

I have difficulty taking seriously a company that had a good product for Linux called ViaVoice, made a big media splash about investing $1B in Linux, then steps over itself to remove all traces of that software as fast as possible.

L

IBM to invest $100 million in Linux push (News.com)

Posted Feb 18, 2005 17:44 UTC (Fri) by mmarq (guest, #2332) [Link]

belive so!...

IBM is going to be mainly a Services Company, less and less interested in "hardware" integration outside of special server iron.

So far so good... wonder when their special server iron gets to be ostracised and enourmsly outsolded by "good enough for the job white box" grocery sellmans, like SUN CEO calls DELL (i belive!), and plenty of others!!??... (Funny SUN has already started selling white box(sort of) too in the form of theirs AMD offerings!!)

If not Desktop!, better if not a new *sort of* white box revolution strongly centered on open standards and open defined firware for commodity hardware(Unix like on RISC like architectures),... i mean the world as showned that *GENERALY* the brand is not viewed as an indication of superiority by itsel, and only capacity, power, support services, and above all price, are the measures.

The paradigma as it is, if not a new better kind of white box explosion, one can argue why not the PPC architecture, and the IA-64 inspite all efforts of Intel and HP, are going the same way of the MIPS, the ALPHA, the PA-RISC, supported by the fact that the SPARC as entered the trend and is almost half the way of the rest.

IBM to invest $100 million in Linux push (News.com)

Posted Feb 18, 2005 20:31 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

wonder when their special server iron gets to be ostracised and enourmsly outsolded by "good enough for the job white box" grocery sellmans
Because the key to IBM's recent success is that five thousand good enough for the job white boxes are a pain to administer; one or two Linux-on-S/390 boxes are much easier to get to grips with, and probably pay for the box in reduced power costs alone. :)

IBM to invest $100 million in Linux push (News.com)

Posted Feb 18, 2005 21:16 UTC (Fri) by mmarq (guest, #2332) [Link]

"...white boxes are a pain to administer; one or two Linux-on-S/390 boxes are much easier to get to grips with, and probably pay for the box in reduced power costs alone"

From the *real* system and network administrative point of view i belive that is correct.

But that is not a problem of *White* anything is a problem between centraly managed and distributedly managed... worst, server consolidation in that way rarely escapes out of the corporate world, while the enourmous majority from large companys to the SOHO will belive any crap that MS says, simply because they dont have comparisation points, S/390 iron is not to be found anyware on the usual resellers, and if they ask directly to IBM they will give up on experimentation and comparisation faster than a flash because of the price.

I'm not against IBM, i simply wonder why traditional Unix world as long forgot the masses of users and apparently still does. Belive that superior solutions dont do any good if they are inresonable difficult to find and are not reasonably and affordly taylored. Enormous profit margins wont came back anymore, and if you fight hard enough the called "White Box(=For the masses)" fenomenon, you will only end up getting out of the market or having to invent new names to sell *white box*,... as SUN discovered.

Sure there always will be market for special iron, but i belive that with x86_64 exploding, the market for those *special* iron (Data Center and Carrier Grade) will get much shorter than it is now. Belive that our favorite Bill in the world is already planning walk partys to the bank, with the sacs of money!...

IBM to invest $100 million in Linux push (News.com)

Posted Feb 19, 2005 19:28 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

But that is not a problem of *White* anything is a problem between centraly managed and distributedly managed...
No, it's a problem of hardware reliability.

When you have thousands of machines, you pretty much have to employ people just to fix boxes that fail because of hardware problems; of course, you also need failover and similar stuff to ensure that individual box failures don't break anything.

While doing all this may be appropriate in some circumstances (Google does something like it, massively distributed), it's certainly not the only option, and if you've got enough boxes, replacing the lot of them with one or two pieces of big iron may be a good move.

IBM to invest $100 million in Linux push (News.com)

Posted Feb 26, 2005 2:11 UTC (Sat) by dberkholz (subscriber, #23346) [Link]

If you like losing half of everything you've got after one hardware failure...

IBM to invest $100 million in Linux push (News.com)

Posted Mar 6, 2005 15:52 UTC (Sun) by hazelsct (subscriber, #3659) [Link]

Actually, it takes multiple simultaneous hardware failures to bring down a mainframe. They are extremely reliable machines with *average* uptimes in years. Yes, a handful of Linux or BSD servers can make it that long, but the average is more like months.

IBM to invest $100 million in Linux push (News.com)

Posted Mar 2, 2005 16:52 UTC (Wed) by scoots987 (guest, #28167) [Link]

Is IBM going to have their own distro? Anyone using it? Has anyone done anything for training at IBM for Linux?

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