Traditionally AIX and Open Source Software (OSS) have a more “distant” relationship than one would like them to have. This is oddly enough, considering how much IBM is contributing in other OSS areas (Linux kernel, Samba, OpenOffice, etc.). Over the years and in discussions with others, i've come up with a list of reasons – in no particular order and in now way exhaustive – as to why this is:
Linux or BSD on x86 hardware or virtual machines are just more common these days. Thus if you want to use, deploy or even develop some OSS tool you'll probably end up using one of those platforms with a mature and ready to use OSS distribution.
Development environments on other platforms are more readily available. See the previous bullet point. But also, IBM has done a far better job than e.g. Sun Microsystems or HP in keeping used hardware off the streets. This has effectively prevented the formation of a significant hobbyist user base or breeding ground of people using OSS on AIX and contributing their gained experiences about running OSS on AIX back to the OSS projects. Admittedly IBM has its own community platform with DeveloperWorks, but it lacks freely accessible build or test hosts like HP used to have for its HP-UX and VMS platforms.
IBM has – at least here in europe – not that much of a close traditional connection to the scientific or educational community like the one e.g. Sun Microsystems had. A lot of the early startups during the first internet hype used Sun Solaris on SPARC as a platform, since the people starting to work there already knew the platfrom from their time at college or university. The experiences gained from those early internet days had a lot of influence on the resulting OSS projects.
AIX is and has always been a bit of an oddball of all the Unixes. Some concepts seem strange at first, but once you get to know them aren't so bad at all (e.g. the shared library concept) or you'll find you'll hate them forever (e.g. the screwed up startup script mess with a mixture of initttab, rc-Scripts and SRC).
IBM has – IMHO in a very snobby way – always branded AIX as a “enterprise class Unix”, thus discarding a lot potential users and customers along the way. It sometimes seems and feels to the user, that one should consider himself lucky to be allowed to run AIX at all. Running it with anything else than a pure IBM software stack (e.g. DB2, WebSphere, Tivoli, Domino, etc.) seems almost blasphemous.
Compared to the development and innovation speed of other platforms like e.g. Linux, BSD or even Solaris 10 and its later versions, AIX appears to progress at a speed of tectonic motion. This is partly due to the previous point and the targeted enterprise market segment. Customers in this particular range want first and foremost RAS features, which on the other hand limit the amount of possible product innovation and renovation.
AIX users are mostly still typical IBM customers in a way that there's not much of a DYI mentality like the one that can be found in the Linux or BSD user base. IBM customers are trained to play by the book and if that doesn't work out, call in for the support they pay their monthly support fee for. I regularly experience this when opening a PMR, skipping right through support levels 0 to 2 because i already tried what they would have suggested and ending up in level 3 support (lab). What is a big annoyance to me, shows on the other hand how the majority of the AIX user base – around which IBM has build its support infrastructure – seems to work.
IBM is still “lawyer town USA”, meaning all the previous efforts (e.g. AIX Toolbox for Linux Applications) to make AIX more OSS-friendly and build at least a modest OSS infrastructure for AIX have been choked to death by the concerns and fear of legal, licensing and liability issues.
Despite all this, Michael Perzl has done a really great job in maintaining and expanding his AIX Open Source Packages which build upon and aim to replace the abandoned AIX Toolbox for Linux Applications. I would very much like to see IBM sponsoring his effort and/or even turning this into a fully fledged community driven project!
To support this effort and to promote AIX in the OSS community, i'll be posting about my own RPMs that are currently missing from Michael Perzls collection, about patches and bug reports submitted to the upstream projects, and about general information and ideas around the OSS on AIX subject.