IBM Open Sourciness Goes Only So Far

December 19, 2016

I love IBM, Big Blue, creator of Watson. Watson, as you may know, is a confection consisting of goodies from IBM’s internal code wizards, acquired technologies like the instantly Big Data friendly Vivisimo, and Lucene. Yep, like Attivio and many other “search” vendors, open source Lucene is the way to reduce the costs for basic information retrieval.

I assume you know about OpenLava, which is an open source system for managing certain types of IBM systems. The Open Lava Web page here states:

With an active community of users and developers, OpenLava development is accelerating, delivering high-quality implementations of important new features including:

Fair-share scheduling – allocate resources between users and groups according to configurable policies

Job pre-emption – Ensure that critical users, jobs and groups have the resources they need – when they need them

Docker support – Providing application isolation, fast service deployment and cloud mobility

Cloud & VM friendly auto-scaling – Easily add or remove cluster nodes on the fly without cluster re-configuration

These features are in addition to the many advanced capabilities already in OpenLava including job arrays, run-windows, n-way host failover, job limits, dependencies for multi-step workflows, parallel job support and much more.

I read “OpenLava under IBM Attack.” I believe everything I read on the Internet. The write up explains that that Big Blue wants the OpenLava open source code removed. The write up states:

IBM claims that the versions of OpenLava starting from 3.0 infringe their copyright
and that some source code have been stolen from them, copied, or otherwise taken
from their code base.

Several thoughts:

The folks involved with OpenLava did knowingly and intentionally rip off IBM’s software, and the marketer of Watson and its open source tinged Watson is taking a logical and appropriate action against the open source alternative to IBM’s own management software
IBM is unhappy with OpenLava’s adoption by IBM customers. IBM customers should buy only software from IBM-authorized sources. Other old school enterprise software companies have this philosophy too.
There is a failure to communicate. OpenLava is not making its case understandable to the outfit poised to hire 25,000 more employees and IBM is not making itself clear to the crafty folks at OpenLava.

I don’t have a dog in the fight. But I find it interesting that IBM Watson with its Lucene tinged capabilities is finding open source distasteful in some circumstances.

Life was far simpler when open source projects were more malleable. Next stop? The legal eagles’ nests.

Stephen E Arnold, December 19, 2016

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Legal matters, News, Open source

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.