ResearchHow IBM Discovered Open Source
Once upon a time, there was a bad guy in the technology world. Almost in the sense of Al Pacino in Scarface blurting "Make way for the Bad Guy!", IBM was so picked on that it had gotten a little sardonic about it's own role. Even to the point of collecting their own government anti-trust suit for monopolizing the computer industry in 1969. Coincidentally, miles away from that New York courtroom, in AT&T's Bell Labs New Jersey facility in that same year, two scruffy programmers named Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie were cooking up a new operating system called "Unix". Unix and IBM were destined to meet from that moment.
The original Unix operating system in it's commercial form had some share of it's own ire. For a while, it looked like the Unix operating system would become the monopolizing agent in the computer world. Instead, the first free and open source versions of Unix began to spin off from it, including BSD, GNU, and eventually Linux.
Meanwhile, IBM found the real software monopoly with Microsoft. IBM and Microsoft both started out with the threadbare DOS operating system, which they jointly owned for all practical purposes - the difference between MS-DOS and PC-DOS mostly in name. IBM and Microsoft grew together, influencing each other. The chief operating system on an IBM machine became Microsoft, and the main computer brand that ran Microsoft software became IBM. They had a false start with the OS/2 operating system, before hitting the big time with Windows.
But the relationship was due to turn sour as the fortunes of the computer industry shifted. Microsoft came down with it's own anti-trust suit for monopoly, IBM got tired of getting the short end of the stick from Microsoft, and IBM's reputation began to suffer. It was now the late 1990's, and a new operating system had come along based on the original Unix system, known as Linux. It was a free and open source system ported first to the i386 architecture of IBM PCs, but rapidly grew to support every piece of hardware IBM made. At this point, history blurs, but apparently IBM one day looked up and said, "What are we getting out of our involvement with Microsoft that we couldn't get from Linux?"
While Microsoft to this day runs exclusively on IBM PCs and clones of same, IBM today focuses it's support on Linux. IBM has since seen it's past bad guy reputation melt away; criticism for monopolist practices is today reserved exclusively for Microsoft. Meanwhile, IBM has it's own Linux section on it's website, with page after page of open source support. Today's IBM is founded on working with Linux. IBM has found in Linux what it failed to find in DOS, OS/2, or Windows: software that could run on their hardware without hogging all the profit. As for Linux, it can at last claim to have what business customers want: a corporate business entity to back it up and provide service and industry solutions for it. IBM boldly touts the security, stability, performance, and low cost of ownership that the team of Linux and IBM can provide. This last has even provoked Microsoft, like a jilted ex-lover, to launch it's own smear campaign against IBM and Linux, known ironically (and with eternal mocking from IT professionals everywhere) as it's "Get the Facts" campaign.
The odyssey of IBM is brought up frequently in computer forums of the present as an example of how a company which was a monopolistic player can find a new life through adapting to the twenty-first-century technology standard of open source. Other companies, such as Sun Microsystems, have tentatively followed in it's steps. It is even speculated that were Microsoft to adopt the open source way, it's problems too could go away. Just a little story of how big companies, like small people, have a place in the world for them to find, however long it takes.