Has IBM changed in the last 20 years?

[Long Haired Hippie Phreek]

When microsoft sold dos to IBM way, way back, they chose to keep the licence, so everyone could get it, and to sell it themselves. IBM agreed, saying that the real money was in the hardware, not the software (hardware was then very expensive.) Now, in this century, they are doing it again, with linux, in the server market, where hardware is still the real money. Is there some kind of plan that I do not see, or are they going back to the orriginal computer system sales model, where parts cost money, and what goes on them is inexpensive, or even free?

[Axel]

Here's an inside scoop - AIX - the IBM version of UNIX - now has a Linux re-compiler in it - so - write something in Linux ( not sure which versions are supported - but probably most are ) and it can be recompiled into AIX code rather easily....

You'll see more and more of that happening as memory capacity is much less of an issue and bad spagetti code isn't as much of a problem with the vast increases in processor cycles.....

Speed up the hardware and allow coders to get away with slow sloppy code as long as it works - That's the new model.....

What's upsetting is product life cycles - Hardware that was new 2 years ago probably won't connect to new equipment.... I've got dozens of perfectly good 2GB SCSI drives in RAID arrays - but they aren't supported on new hardware. They'd be great for file cold storage where speed really doesn't matter that much - but stability really does..... So I can basically junk good and expensive equipment because it cannot easily be configured on new equipment. And it's only two years old with hardly a coat of dust on it.... Now THAT pisses me off..... I hate doing away with good equipment just because it isn't supported on a new platform or they won't make a new driver for it on the latest OS which you need to run some new software -e etc. etc. I think there is a new market niche for some third party out there to develop drivers for old equipment on new OS and hardware platforms......

[daverme]

To my knowledge, Linux is "freeware"; nobody can sell Linux, per se.

Being an IBM mainframe dinosaur for 3.5 decades now, I can say without fear of contradiction that IBM has been selling software since about 1970. Before that, it was "bundled" with their hardware, as was free on-site tech support. Then the Justice Dept. got on their case and they started to "unbundle". They still had some "bundled" software that would do very basic stuff but if you wanted all the features that everybody needed, you had to buy the upgraded stuff. That's still true today.