Very interesting first day here in Armonk for the Linux analyst conference; it’s been well worth the 5 hour drive (which will soon be a 4 hour flight). From the percentage of IBM’s Linux revenue that’s non-x86 based (40) to the number of IBM developers that are heads down working on Linux (>600), there have been a number of little factoids that while not really surprising are a little unexpected. The overriding theme – from both the analyst day itself and the new bodies added to the Linux AR team – is that Linux (particularly on the server) has clearly come a long way from its EBO[1] days.
For all its aggressiveness in the server space, however, IBM is still somewhat cautious about the outlook for Linux on the client; more cautious, I think, than it needs to be. No one’s saying that Linux is going to blow the doors off Windows, but the Workplace stuff is an interesting cross-platform thick client with thin client manageability that could be pushed harder, IMO. Ken Bisconti from Lotus did an excellent demo of the latest rev of the Workplace client (on Red Hat), and it was pretty impressive. Hope to have a beta soon.
While I didn’t find any takers for my IBM supports Debian idea, we did have an interesting debate about the Linux UI shism between Gnome and KDE. My own feeling is that the split has been reconciled within most of the major commercial distros, so that it’s not as detrimental to the development process as many believe.
A couple of other topics of conversation, raised by yours truly: Hula, Mono (c’mon, you can’t be surprised by that ;), and PHP. As for PHP, I’m really looking forward to hearing from the Emerging Technologies group (Rod Smith’s gang) tomorrow, as they led the charge with the Zend partnership.
My one regret for the evening was that when I cranked out my laptop at dinner to demo Tomboy and Beagle to Daren Hanson, Director of Marketing for WW Linux & Emerging Markets, Tomboy crashed immediately (I was playing with different versions during a break trying to get 0.3.1 installed and borqed it) and Beagle was inoperative (0.8.1’s been good, but after returning no results on one query this afternoon it simply quit working). Such has been my luck in trying to demo Linux apps, but at least Portage worked.
All in all, not a bad day. Now if only the opening session wasn’t at 8 AM 😉
[1] Emerging Business Opportunity: a business unit classification used by IBM to denote promising but as yet immature technologies.
