StCredZero On IBM's Support Of Open Source

All's fair in love & war. Sometimes business is like war. IBM was the Microsoft of its day. They've got a longer history of dirty tricks than just about anybody out there.

So how do you destroy a competitor, legally, soaking up goodwill from the programmer community all the while? Commodify your Competition's Product! Sun was pushing Java big-time for awhile. So why would IBM help it by funding Eclipse? Because by doing so, they commodify Java development environments, eliminating a potential revenue stream for Sun. Eclipse is a weapon against Sun! Why do you think they named it "Eclipse!?" What does an Eclipse do?

It's one thing to pull dirty tricks. It's another thing to be able to pull dirty tricks on the dirty tricksters. It's yet again another thing to do all that, and win the goodwill of the community at the same time! So, by opposing OOXML [Microsoft's document standard], IBM is hurting Microsoft, opening up a potential market for consulting services (There has been a fair bit of money to be made in automated document processing for government!) and winning kudos from us Open Source community to boot.