4 ms·

The last 15 years of IBM has basically been open. 1) They're in the top 5 re: Linux contributors. (Guess who else is in there? Microsoft.) 2) They dropped the

The last 15 years of IBM has basically been open. 1) They're in the top 5 re: Linux contributors. (Guess who else is in there? Microsoft.) 2) They dropped their JVM (J9) for OpenJDK - again upstreaming their patches to the community. 3) Eclipse was founded by them in 2001 (later released into the public domain). 4) They released (at least part of) their ML system "SystemML" into the public domain as well, during the same month MS opened theirs and Google opened TensorFlow. They aren't patent trolls in the sense of those Texas LLP's who lease a few hundred square feet and fire off scare-letters. They hold a lot of patents because they are one of the few companies that actually funds pure research. They make a ton of money by bilking banks/the feds/states who still run their RMV on AIX @ 2mill a year in support contracts, etc, who are vendor-locked in. A not insignificant amount of money goes to: 5) Post-docs from really smart uni's to publish theoretical comp sci work in more journals than you'd imagine, which guess what? is also public domain! They're really not hurting the consumer at all. In fact, I honestly don't see how they could be MORE open. ------ [1] (And guess Who's not upstream'ing much at all but making billions off community written software? I'll give you a hint, its not Barnes & Noble! Even VMware donated back to FreeBSD. Support HN users who actually pay-it-forward[2] and use Tarsnap[3] instead of S3.) [2] https://www.freebsdnews.com/2015/02/25/donate-freebsd-foundation/ https://www.freebsdnews.com/2015/02/25/donate-freebsd-founda... [3] www.tarsnap.com . Not affiliated with Colin but he's been a long-time HNer who isn't a conglomerate, taking GPL/BSD software, slapping a pretty coat of paint on it and selling it for huge margins. Pay a few cents extra and support startups. Karma, guys. < /preachy hippie shit>

baldfat 11y ago
IBM is the number one patent company for each of the following years. 1999 - 2015 I can't see much beyond this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_top_United_States_patent_recipients https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_top_United_States_pate...
awqrre 11y ago
> 1) They're in the top 5 re: Linux contributors. (Guess who else is in there? Microsoft.) quantity and quality of contributions doesn't mean that they are the most useful contributions though
- baldfat 11y ago
  Open Source has won in Enterprise and every company has examples. Microsoft has continued down that road especially the last few years. IBM has made some moves but the vast majority of its strategy is with closed source projects like Watson.
- iheartmemcache 11y ago
  I really don't want to turn this into a Microsoft praise fest but similar to IBM, they've been a net-zero since about Ballmer era, and a net-positive since Satya took over. All of that Microsoft Research papers which silently go unnoticed in Silicon Valley (or published under the MSR, INRIA // MSR, Cambridge name and people don't do the math) but here's a few things MS has been responsible for a: Asynchrony -- the async / await paradigm - if you use it in JavaScript it came from C#, which came from a MSR paper (or maybe a Microsoft Languages whitepaper.) A lot of the semantics took a very long time by very smart people to work out the execution logistics, and we get to reap the benefits. b: Haskell -- paying SPJ's salary so he can work on Haskell full-time as a MSR Cambridge employee and implement a whole bevy of things like STM[1], the popularization of pure functions (immutable.js users, as well as CLJS) c: Clojure -- if you use Clojure's STM, borrowed from work funded by Microsoft. For me, it's used every day in Datomic. d: Verifiability -- a mind-blowingly large amount of formal verification stuff - ranging from the first formally verified OS + integrated language, to things like F* e: Z3 -- no need to explain this if you're in any sort of reverse-engineering I'm sure your life has been made significantly easier since MS released this into the public domain f: CoreCLR + the JS engine + their crossplatform 100% free IDE + opening up VS Community (which is about as as VS Professional) g: Probably most importantly -- Well, just go here. http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/groups/rise/default.aspx http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/groups/rise/default.aspx. Basically 1 out of 4 things in there is already, or will be imminently, used by 'mainstream' languages after it moves out of the "only publishing grad students who eagerly wait for POPL every year" zone. [1] I know STM comes from that '88 paper. I've read it. SPJ did too and brought it into the mainstream, so I give him credit. IBM and Microsoft (and, presumably GoogleX but they havent been publishing) are one of the few corporations I'm aware of that dedicate more than a few resources to research-for-the-sake-of-research (n.b. MS has been doing this silently since 1991, and IIRC employ more than 100 staff just to produce work to the field of computer science further.)
scholia 11y ago
Pretty trivial stuff in the context of an $81.7bn corporation. IBM makes the vast majority of its turnover and profits from closed, proprietary systems, most of which are in decline (it used to be a $107bn corporation). > They're really not hurting the consumer at all. The public pays indirectly to support the extremely expensive IBM systems that, partly for historical reasons, still run almost all Fortune 500 companies. You may say that "They make a ton of money by bilking banks/the feds/states", but ultimately it's consumers and taxpayers who foot the bills. PS You forgot OpenPower ;-)
- iheartmemcache 11y ago
  I considered that -- we're effectively subsidizing research. I feel way better about that, then giving defense contractors 300/hr to drag&drop some Telerik components into Visual Studio. I figure that's the lesser of two evils IMO. Some companies don't even pay taxes -take Apple[1] who posted 30 billion in profit (for those of you who haven't paid retained earnings taxes, that's ~10 billion that should have gone to the federal government, and if you live in California, your state wouldn't be broke anymore (or significantly less broke)). More than $100 billion dollars homed in a nominal 'headquarters' to rob hard working Americans. (Granted I'd be transfer pricing too if my corporation could afford to retain Skadden, haha.) On the upside, I think they pay the salary for a few LLVM guys. We digress. Support other startups, if you have a startup - use Tarsnap. ;) [1] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/may/29/apple-tax-profits-ireland-cork http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/may/29/apple-tax-... (The Guardian does have a bit of a liberal slant, FYI. Think of them as the UK's NYT.)
  - scholia 11y ago
    The spending on pure research is trivial compared with IBM's profits. In its last financial year: "Total capital return to shareholders of $9.5 billion; dividends of $4.9 billion and gross share repurchases of $4.6 billion" http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/48846.wss http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/48846.wss IBM also spends a lot of money buying dozens of companies to bolster its results. These include These include Cognos ($5bn), Softlayer ($2bn), Netezza ($1.7bn), Kenexa ($1.4bn) and Trusteer ($1bn). http://www.zdnet.com/article/ibm-vs-microsoft-and-the-battle-for-the-corporate-cloud-business/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/ibm-vs-microsoft-and-the-battle...
cperciva 11y ago
use Tarsnap instead of S3 I'm not entirely sure what you mean by this... I mean, Tarsnap is built on top of Amazon S3, so using Tarsnap will still mean that your data is ultimately stored in S3. The difference is that tarsnap would deduplicate, compress, encrypt, and sign your data first.

baldfat 11y ago

IBM is the number one patent company for each of the following years. 1999 - 2015 I can't see much beyond this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_top_United_States_patent_recipients https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_top_United_States_pate...

awqrre 11y ago

> 1) They're in the top 5 re: Linux contributors. (Guess who else is in there? Microsoft.) quantity and quality of contributions doesn't mean that they are the most useful contributions though

baldfat 11y ago
Open Source has won in Enterprise and every company has examples. Microsoft has continued down that road especially the last few years. IBM has made some moves but the vast majority of its strategy is with closed source projects like Watson.
iheartmemcache 11y ago
I really don't want to turn this into a Microsoft praise fest but similar to IBM, they've been a net-zero since about Ballmer era, and a net-positive since Satya took over. All of that Microsoft Research papers which silently go unnoticed in Silicon Valley (or published under the MSR, INRIA // MSR, Cambridge name and people don't do the math) but here's a few things MS has been responsible for a: Asynchrony -- the async / await paradigm - if you use it in JavaScript it came from C#, which came from a MSR paper (or maybe a Microsoft Languages whitepaper.) A lot of the semantics took a very long time by very smart people to work out the execution logistics, and we get to reap the benefits. b: Haskell -- paying SPJ's salary so he can work on Haskell full-time as a MSR Cambridge employee and implement a whole bevy of things like STM[1], the popularization of pure functions (immutable.js users, as well as CLJS) c: Clojure -- if you use Clojure's STM, borrowed from work funded by Microsoft. For me, it's used every day in Datomic. d: Verifiability -- a mind-blowingly large amount of formal verification stuff - ranging from the first formally verified OS + integrated language, to things like F* e: Z3 -- no need to explain this if you're in any sort of reverse-engineering I'm sure your life has been made significantly easier since MS released this into the public domain f: CoreCLR + the JS engine + their crossplatform 100% free IDE + opening up VS Community (which is about as as VS Professional) g: Probably most importantly -- Well, just go here. http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/groups/rise/default.aspx http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/groups/rise/default.aspx. Basically 1 out of 4 things in there is already, or will be imminently, used by 'mainstream' languages after it moves out of the "only publishing grad students who eagerly wait for POPL every year" zone. [1] I know STM comes from that '88 paper. I've read it. SPJ did too and brought it into the mainstream, so I give him credit. IBM and Microsoft (and, presumably GoogleX but they havent been publishing) are one of the few corporations I'm aware of that dedicate more than a few resources to research-for-the-sake-of-research (n.b. MS has been doing this silently since 1991, and IIRC employ more than 100 staff just to produce work to the field of computer science further.)

scholia 11y ago

Pretty trivial stuff in the context of an $81.7bn corporation. IBM makes the vast majority of its turnover and profits from closed, proprietary systems, most of which are in decline (it used to be a $107bn corporation). > They're really not hurting the consumer at all. The public pays indirectly to support the extremely expensive IBM systems that, partly for historical reasons, still run almost all Fortune 500 companies. You may say that "They make a ton of money by bilking banks/the feds/states", but ultimately it's consumers and taxpayers who foot the bills. PS You forgot OpenPower ;-)

iheartmemcache 11y ago
I considered that -- we're effectively subsidizing research. I feel way better about that, then giving defense contractors 300/hr to drag&drop some Telerik components into Visual Studio. I figure that's the lesser of two evils IMO. Some companies don't even pay taxes -take Apple[1] who posted 30 billion in profit (for those of you who haven't paid retained earnings taxes, that's ~10 billion that should have gone to the federal government, and if you live in California, your state wouldn't be broke anymore (or significantly less broke)). More than $100 billion dollars homed in a nominal 'headquarters' to rob hard working Americans. (Granted I'd be transfer pricing too if my corporation could afford to retain Skadden, haha.) On the upside, I think they pay the salary for a few LLVM guys. We digress. Support other startups, if you have a startup - use Tarsnap. ;) [1] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/may/29/apple-tax-profits-ireland-cork http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/may/29/apple-tax-... (The Guardian does have a bit of a liberal slant, FYI. Think of them as the UK's NYT.)
- scholia 11y ago
  The spending on pure research is trivial compared with IBM's profits. In its last financial year: "Total capital return to shareholders of $9.5 billion; dividends of $4.9 billion and gross share repurchases of $4.6 billion" http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/48846.wss http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/48846.wss IBM also spends a lot of money buying dozens of companies to bolster its results. These include These include Cognos ($5bn), Softlayer ($2bn), Netezza ($1.7bn), Kenexa ($1.4bn) and Trusteer ($1bn). http://www.zdnet.com/article/ibm-vs-microsoft-and-the-battle-for-the-corporate-cloud-business/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/ibm-vs-microsoft-and-the-battle...

cperciva 11y ago

use Tarsnap instead of S3 I'm not entirely sure what you mean by this... I mean, Tarsnap is built on top of Amazon S3, so using Tarsnap will still mean that your data is ultimately stored in S3. The difference is that tarsnap would deduplicate, compress, encrypt, and sign your data first.