Thirteen Months That Changed IBM (2020)

That's Dan Frye's article, and it is um, a little Dan Frye-centric. He was a legitimately important contributor to IBM's technology management team around Linux and open source, especially as and after IBM made the turn.

But it reads as if he called the shot and piloted the turn. That is not my recollection or understanding. Other folks contributed as much or more to driving the Linux/open source pivot. Irving Wladawsky-Berger, the late Scott Handy, _et al_. It's IBM, so there were a ton of folks involved and contributing.

My source: I was an industry analyst and consultant in the server / system software space at the time, and I was in at least a few of the rooms where it happened.

It is so wild to me the idea of large enterprises that rely on the big "old" databases (db2, IMS, vsam) - on one hand, I think "there must be a whole devops crew that supports these on-prem systems that are super old and unique" and the other hand is "they must be pretty reliable for the task at hand and no one wants to touch the migration project to update." Which makes me think these are still in use at the biggest and oldest enterprises( banks, government entities). Would love to hear any anecdotes from folks who work on those today.

Random article from 2020. I used Linux when I worked at IBM in the mid 2000s and it was an uphill battle.