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Hmmm...
After opening up its Power chips to bit fiddlers through an ARM-style licensee model, IBM is pouring $1bn into Linux development on the architecture. The $1bn commitment to Linux on Power was announced by IBM on Tuesday at the Linux conference in New Orleans, and follows Big Blue letting licensees fiddle with Power chips …
Doubtless this is much the same as the 2000(?) announcement: the next 10 years normal business expenditure rolled into an impressive sounding PR spewball. I think I read somewhere it even includes the budget for swanky new IBM towers somewhere in France. So sadly not as exciting as it first sounds.
Very nice. IBM has made a lot of money on Linux and supported it a lot too. Adding support for Power on Linux is common sense. What I have been hoping for is a IBM Linux desktop distro, why not on Power. Asking for to much, perhaps, but the "Rising open source tide" is no doubt true, and that is fine with me, and again just common sense.
I just want to add that IBM was the second big company, after Microsoft, to understand the value of Linux. The importance of IBM regarding Linux is huge. In the beginning, I suppose, it was more about the Web and DB2. The ability to run Linux on Power has been there all the time. Adding more support is again fine indeed.
Linux has been ported to and used (both in development and commercially) on IBM Power hardware and mainframe for many years - SUSE & Redhat among various others. You may have forgotten how SCO (former owner of AT&T Unix - later sold to Novell) who also licenced Microsoft Xenix (another Unix derivative) had various long running patent infringment battles against Linux. Microsoft had long been a major share-holder in SCO and later it was discovered that MS had bankrolled SCO's attempts to kill/hinder Linux.
So yes, I reckon "MS understood the value of Linux" and they didn't like what they saw...