Adventures in systems land

Kudos to the folks over at Sun for the new ODF plug-ins for Microsoft Office. Former colleague Simon Phipps alerted me to them in a post in his blog. Whatever I think about Suns server/hardware strategy, you can’t deny that Sun, under Simon’s direction, are doing some great things with and/for open source. Nice one!

The Plug-ins are here.

Interesting piece on open source and some of the collatoral damage it can create, along with some interesting industry observations from wunderkind James Governor of Redmonk.

There are often big side effects from even small changes in directions by big corporations, certainly many of these are known before they happen, but many are not. Looking back on the early days of our Linux drive(’98/’99), I recognise some of these effects, many people wanted to believe that we did Linux purely to get back at Microsoft, and while that might have been a good reason for some people, it was purely collatoral damage if it did happen.

The effort was really about repositioning IBM, and putting IBM in a position to be ready for the downstream innovation that would come from the thousands of technologists in emerging and existing economies who would be exposed to Linux and the whole ecosystem and open source approach. It was also a “poster child” to push open source within IBM.

As they say, “hindsight is a wonderful thing”.

A useful new web page has been put together to describe and link to the key open source projects at IBM http://www.ibm.com/opensource

It contains information on the “Open Source beyond Linux” initiatives announced at LinuxWorld in August 2006 as well as Web Application Servers, Client (as in client/server) Collaboration, Software Development, Database Servers, Storage Management, Database Servers, Blade.org and Power.org, Globus Alliance and Grid Offerings, and Open Source Services.