"IBM puts a full-court press on someone in its latest
series of metaphor-laden TV ads, which features "Linux" and "IBM
solutions" playing round ball. In these ads, the game of basketball
stands for competition, no doubt. The question in my mind is
whether that competition is a battle of the big guys in the center
position -- IBM and Microsoft -- or if I am reading too much into
them, and the competition in question is nothing more than that
between any enterprise doing business on the Internet and 3v1l
hax0rs.
The team in blue -- that would be IBM -- is called
Infrastructure . The good guys feature players named PC, Firewall,
Middleware, Mainframe, and a newcomer named Linux. The bad guys --
dressed in black, naturally -- are a team called Crash, which
consists of players named Downtime, Virus, Hacker, Spike, and
Spam.
It would be entirely natural and fitting for IBM to use free
software in general, and Linux in particular, to take shots at its
one-time protege. It hasn't been that many years since Microsoft
first felt brave enough to stab its benefactor/partner in the back,
as Microsoft did during the OS/2 saga. And fewer still since
Redmond demanded that IBM drop the competing operating system from
its product line by refusing to grant IBM a preload license for
Windows 95 until 15 minutes prior to its launch, and raising the
price for the license by 700 percent when they did grant it. There
is no doubt IBM owes Microsoft a couple of intentional fouls, and
maybe a technical or two as well."
