Sharing is good!

Fortune (subscription required) takes a look at the strategy behind IBM sharing patents, contributing to the open source community, and helping make technology more open rather than proprietary (all this from the company that used to sell the most proprietary mainframes!).

Fortune article (Intranet version) - Nice; goes into history, and talks about a lot of things, including Infy and Wipro!

An excerpt (something I liked):

Growth in the developing world is a natural part of implementing a "global delivery model" for services, says senior vice president Bob Moffat. In July, Palmisano reorganized services, naming the 49- year-old Moffat one of three executives who will run it jointly. While the other two will oversee the delivery of services to clients, Moffat's job is to find efficiencies. He spent the past three years taking billions of dollars in costs out of IBM's physical supply chain--the delivery of parts and goods to and from factories and on to the customer. His mission now is to cut the cost of delivering services, even high-value ones, by tightening the "services supply chain." That mostly means people--getting the right ones to the right place at the right time. He has to extract every last penny of value from IBM's 260,000 developed-country employees if they're going to stay on the payroll.

Palmisano has picked someone he knows and trusts--Moffat has worked closely with him at almost every step of his career--to oversee what is in effect a redesign of half the company.

The corporate Mr. Fixit rises daily around 4 A.M. to do e-mail and make calls around the world. He works till after 7 P.M. He has an obvious intensity, but simultaneously can be disarmingly casual and interested in whomever he's talking to. That serves him well in his endless dealings with IBM employees, many of whose jobs he is likely to change before he's through.

Sun's been more of a 'sharing' company too.

Did you know that Microsoft even has a centre dedicated to making sure that Windows works well with Linux?? (Microsoft working with Linux?!) Read on.