Tianji On August 5th, IBM announced at the "LinuxWorld" Expo on August 3, the company decided to donate more than 500,000 dollar source code worth $ 85 million to the Apache Software Foundation. Apache will study Cloudscape as an open source project. Then IBM is so generous, what medicine is sold in his gourd? "Commercial Week" has been published, and IBM's movement is the same as SUN and CA's motivation, and its ultimate goal is to suppress competitors Microsoft.
For IBM, it is a very easy thing to donate software source code. Just like the development software aims to defeat the competitors, there is also the same motivation. Although supporting open source means to abandon intellectual property, give up their hard work crystallization. But there are still countless large and small companies are willing to donate their source code to open source groups. But they do this, often for the needs of fierce market competition.
On August 3, IBM officially announced that all source code of its database software Cloudscape is donated to the Apache Software Foundation. IBM said that this is the company's first donation of complete commercial source code. Previously, BEA, Sun and CA, etc., made their software source code to open source groups.
So people can't help but ask why IBM, BEA, Sun and CA will become so generous? In fact, these are all market competition. With the pressure of companies from Microsoft and Red Hats, these companies can only be forced to help open the open source population of thousands of supporters.
Therefore, we can say that this is an implicit interest. IBM said that its Cloudscape database software is worth $ 85 million, but IBM firmly believes in the long-term perspective, its harvest is far more than IBM other software, hardware and service sales revenue.
Of course, how to pursue this contrary, self-contained, and it is determined by the company itself. Taking BEA as an example, its purpose is to hope that the company's software can attract an open source developer's interest. The analyst said the "BeeHive" "Beehive" "Beehive" will attract a large number of open source developers to a large extent to promote the development of BEA software.
In contrast, CA announced a source code program for vintage database products "Ingres" in May this year. In order to seek more developers, CA also plans to host a total of $ 1 million in a total of $ 1 million this month, aim to encourage developers to write a wide range of programs to make currently popular databases. The data is transferred to the INGRES database. At that time, CA will select five best developers, the first prize of about $ 300,000.
Of course, it is time to determine who will become the final winner. But fundamentally, these companies are in order to avoid endless competition from Microsoft. More than 20 years, Microsoft always pays special attention to attracting the interests of software developers, encouraging them to develop a variety of applications based on Windows operating systems. The products of these developers have further improved the importance of Microsoft products.
The analyst said, whether it is a BEA's "Beehive" project, or IBM's "Cloudscape" project, they all contribute to the further popularization of the Java platform. Of course, it is undeniable that IBM and Sun have already launched active cooperation with open source groups a few years ago. In the early 1990s, Sun has announced the source code for its "Network File System (NFS)" application, and has now become a unified standard for computer networking. Open source projects currently on IBM are more than 150.
