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...business model which provides types of flexibility, opportunity, and benefits different than those provided by the conventional model. IBM was among the earliest of the major computer companies to embrace open source software and was probably the first to realize that doing so could be consistent with our business goals. Indeed, a problem with which IBM has long contended is that of how to provide to our customers internally developed software that was not planned to be a product, without the inevitable support and product issues.
IBM's business strategy has long been centered around open standards, both for hardware and software, wherever that is feasible and practical, and IBM has taken an active role in the development of standards related to the company's business.
Early on, it was perceived that OSS offered interesting opportunities with respect to these activities, and that as a result, there were many reasons to investigate how best to integrate open-source software with our business.
BEGINNINGS
In December of 1998, an effort was first made to understand the broad strategic implications for IBM of open source software. At that point, it was clear that the OSS phenomenon was taking hold in a substantial way. Most visibly, Linux ** was starting to appear widely in the media, but more importantly, parts of our customer organizations were starting to pay attention, with Linux reportedly being used in sonre cases without the involvement or blessing of corporate IT organizations. Quickly, we realized that whether this evolved into an important force or whether it remained a minor fad, the potential was such that it was important to understand its implications for our customers and for us and be able to respond appropriately. Before 1999, our involvement was on a case-by-case basis.
It was apparent that some new IBM employees were aware of OSS and the collaborative aspects of the OSS model. Students newly completing their Ph.D. degrees joined IBM after having done their thesis work and making it available to the world, often under an established open-source license. Allowing them to continue working in their thesis area and continue to contribute to the open-source project that they had initiated while in school stretched the limits of IBM's standard business practices. At the same time, it provided an early warning of the issues involved with OSS.
An important issue was the quality of software that was produced by open-source communities and their collaboration. Much of IBM's product software development was historically quite structured, with substantial initial planning and design, followed by implementation, unit and system testing phases, and of course ongoing support and maintenance. Many at IBM had the impression--partly from what appeared in the business and technical press--that open-source software efforts were closer to the other end of the spectrum in terms of structure and management discipline, and they were accordingly skeptical that the quality of the open-source software produced could be sufficient to be relevant to us and our customers.
These early fears turned out to be unfounded. Even at that time (ca. 1999), the quality of the software from the open-source projects investigated was impressive. It was clear that this development style attracted very skilled developers, and that the overlap between developers and users of a particular OSS project made possible excellent and open communication, rapid development cycles, and intensive real-environment testing, ultimately producing software that was often very good and sometimes excellent by our standards. At the same time, it was immediately clear that there were important areas where IBM's large and excellent technical community could make significant contributions, having substantial experience, and in doing so, our customers could be helped to reap the benefits of our expertise in an open context. In more recent years, the possibility of inverting the model has been investigated, whereby our proprietary development activities can benefit from what has been learned from the open community.
As this work was going on, its urgency was growing. IBM had released a binary-only version for UNIX ** of Jikes, a compiler for Java **, through our alpha-Works * Web site (2) in early 1997. This was quite successful, but its success was only a prelude to the release of a Linux version of the same code in mid-July 1998, which was downloaded at seven times the rate of the non-Linux versions. Requests for the source code followed rapidly, and at roughly the same time as we were beginning to understand the larger, strategic implications, the source code for Jikes was released in late 1998 under a rather liberal license based on the Apache ** license. (3)
One of our first and most memorable experiences with OSS followed the Jikes source code release. Within eight hours of the release, a programmer in California sent an e-mail to the Jikes authors containing a non-trivial enhancement to the compiler, one which required investing some time and effort to understand the code.
From the outset, it was clear that a host of...
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