Interesting debates arise around us every day. The latest "patent pledge" excitement on the web is interesting to watch. I tried to dig through and read the details of the various lists of patents, but the eyes glaze and I have to wonder who's pulling who's chain.
With some mild interest, I saw the Linux Foundation blog post this evening re-iterating the pledge from 2005 - quoting a statement from Dan Frye.
Now, I probably don't really count as an unbiased observer, working directly in Dan Frye's organization, but I will observe that in our day-to-day interactions with Linux and customers, our focus is promoting open-source solutions every day. Some of us even take some quiet personal delight in catching up and passing classic IBM proprietary solutions, but our real focus is getting customers up, running, and happy.
Admit'ably, my world is focused primarily on helping customers tune and improve the mostly open-source based deployments of fairly complex applications on Linux on POWER systems. In day to day work, I've been most impressed with the varied partners (both open-source and proprietary) that we implicitly and explicitly work with. The dedication to making things "just work" and "then work nicely" strikes me as the path that customers expect us to embrace.
The process of open-source and improving performance is usually a challenging process. We've got lists of cool performance things I'd love to see implemented. The gate to getting these pieces implemented is not the patents, it's the process of getting consensus and convincing the "community" to adopt something that'll work smoothly across the platforms. Once you have that, we've enabled our customers to have the pieces they need to implement, tune, understand, and optimize their applications and software stacks. And all in all, it's reassuring to see the calm reassurance of IBM's commitments and continued "work nice" community approach being reinforced. It's why many of us greatly prefer working in the Linux space.
Now, back to ganglia and CPU utilization. Something's not quite right there. More on that next week.
