Re: OT: IBM to buy RedHat Comment on IBM Side

[Michael D. Setzer II]

Can put a personnel opinion on IBM side of this. 
My College became a part of the IBM academic initiative program 5+ years 
ago. They provided the service we used free of charge.
My College has a 12 year old mini system that had 256M of Ram and 24G of 
disk with a single CPU and was two major versions out of date, since the 
hardware didn't support either version 6 or 7 of the OS.
The program had a system in Arizonia that we could access via the internet, 
and it had 48 CPUs, 2TB of Ram at the beginning and think it was like 
2048TB of disk. Also, had all the lastest software available on the system. 
There were already 63 other colleges and universities in the program. Got 
connected via a friend in a Star Trek fan club (Chase Masterson), and it was 
a simple phone call to get the setup. They were very helpful, and always 
worked to make the system as best they could.

Know the main goal of IBM is to make money, and be a big player in the field, 
but they seem to see the benefit of supporting the community. I can only 
hope that the Fedora will continue with the same or even more support. 

Know they had a Linux option as well, that run on the mini, but being a 
community college, didn't have the vast range of courses or large number of 
students. 

Unfortunately, I retired last year, and neither the college or the other 3 
instructors took up the torch. Don't know what they did with the Linux 
program either. Had run Redhat 9 thru Fedora 24 before I retired. Was 
planning on doing the upgrade to Fedora 25 last summer, but was told since 
I wasn't teaching summer classes, I wasn't suppose to be on campus after 
34+ years at the college. (Some kind of security issue that effected 
everyone). Was scheduled to teach 7 classes the next semester, but without 
access couldn't prepare the labs or servers to do the job right.

Hopefully, the IBM deal will make Linux a bigger issue. Colleges MIS is about 
90% Windows only, and 10% with some Mac. All the linux was on my own.



+------------------------------------------------------------+
 Michael D. Setzer II - Computer Science Instructor (Retired)     
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