My recent comments about how different people and IBM view Linux and the GPL prompted my IBM buddy Steve Holbrook to send a link in Salon about How Big Blue Fell for Linux by Andrew Leonard. Here is an excerpt:
Then came the morning of Dec. 14, 1998.
That day, John Markoff, the lead technology reporter for the New York Times, wrote a short piece entitled ìSharing Software, IBM to Release Mail Program Blueprint.î In it, Markoff detailed how IBM was planning to release a mail program called Secure Mailer, developed by a programmer named Wietse Venema, as open source. What the article didnít say was that the program had been something that Venema had created before joining IBM, that it had always been open source, and that IBM was only now acknowledging that Venema could keep working on it as an open-source project.
But that didnít matter. All that counted was that IBM CEO Lou Gerstner read the article, and, according to legend, immediately became apoplectic. As far as he knew, IBM already had a mail programóit was part of the Lotus Notes package. And if IBM was endorsing open-source software as a worthwhile strategy, then Gerstner wanted to know about it.
James Barry says that Gerstner didnít care one way or another about open source as a software methodology. Barry says that Gerstner frequently liked to note, ìI am not a technologist.î What he cared about was strategy. Did IBM have an open-source strategy? And if so, what was it?
The funny part was how the port to the 360 was done in secret.