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Comment by rodgerd

7 years ago

Show me a single core product IBM have open sourced.

To some degree they have opened the Power9, which is hardware. For hardware it's like leaps and bounds more open than anything else out there that can compete with it.

RISC-V is more open, but the hardware isn't necessarily open, and it's not yet really competing at the same scale as Power9 does... yet. There is hope :)

I'm sure that you can draw a line where it does not count as "core product", but Eclipse has to count as something.

  • The motivation behind Eclipse/JWT was similar to the French supporting American rebels in the late 18th century. It had nothing to do with what they stood for and everything to do with being able to poke a stick in the eye of their most hated enemy (Sun and Great Britain, respectively). Hell, the name and logo even tells you what they're trying to do.

    • You are a bit unkind to the French: ideological affinity between American and French revolutionaires clearly went beyond their hatred for a common enemy, as proven by the overall shape of resulting Constitutions.

      I do agree on the aims of the Eclipse project though.

      2 replies →

  • Eclipse is horribly bloated. Many, many developers have moved to IntelliJ IDEA.

    • So have I, but I haven't forgotten how much of a godsend it used to be. I do occasionally wonder if eclipse was actually better then or if it has just stagnated while the rest of the world marched on.

OpenBMC is worked on by the OzLabs group (which is the core of some of their mainframe BMCs), as well as lots of work around POWER9 and s390. Don't get me wrong, they are a proprietary shop at the end of the day, but they do an incredible amount of free software work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JFS_(file_system)

https://openpowerfoundation.org/

They have many (you might argue some are somewhat autist but there are): https://developer.ibm.com/code/open/projects/

And they also do several contributions, e.g. openstack, linux kernel

I would agree that IBM is not pop enough and that their motivation is usually not based on ideals or a social contract.

EDIT: I forgot IBM Blockchain, which you might think it is not "core" just because the company is still divided between areas like services, consulting and hardware...

https://github.com/IBM-Blockchain

There was an era when IBM's "core products" were hardware. I think today their "core product" is consulting.

Open source hardware exists but is rare. I don't know what it means to open source consulting?