"It's not earthshaking but a logical step for IBM to take with this particular technology," said Mike Gilpin, vice president of Forrester Research, Cambridge, Mass. "They've shown with other techs that in Java it can be helpful to bring in intellectual capacity of the open source community to help technologies grow. Any time it's a more commoditized technology, where it's not where IBM wants to differentiate, it makes sense to do thisand I think you'll see more of this approach not only by IBM but other companies as well."
The news will come today at LinuxWorld Expo in San Francisco. The contribution amounts to more than a half million lines of code which IBM estimates to be worth $85 million. IBM Software acquired Cloudscape in its billion-dollar buyout of the Informix database business three years ago.
At that time, Cloudscape, an embeddable Java-based database, was something of an afterthought in IBM's effort to buy enterprise database market share. But more recently it's come into its own. IBM Lotus selected it as the client database for its strategic Workplace offerings.
IBM said this is the first time IBM has turned over a commercial product to the open source world. It is unclear whether IBM will continue to offer a commercial version of the database as well. Besides Workplace, Cloudscape is embedded in WebSphere Application Server and portal software.
With this move, IBM hopes to make Cloudscape the de facto standard embeddable databases. It may also hope to ratchet up pressure on Sun Microsystems to open source more or all of Java itself, some observers said.
Discover the benefits of scalable backbone and network services for application and cloud providers.
Network automation is gaining momentum. Here's how you can drive this powerful technology to its full potential.
Subsea cable alternatives can provide a level of comfort for those concerned about disruptions. Realistically, they will continue to play a small, but critical role in the short term.
