IBM has become legendary in the Linux community for its repeated announcements and reannouncements regarding Linux support. It seems every six months at some Linux show or even a general PC show, IBM pledges across-the-board Linux support. That is all very odd because since Big Blue's first altar conversion a couple of years ago, it has done a great deal for the Linux community (despite purported resistance from the AIX group), but by constantly reproclaiming its allegiance, it gives the impression that it never followed through on prior pledges.

The truth is that IBM's many contributions to Linux have been typical Big Blue: very practical and thus very boring. Jikes, IBM JDK, Apache patches, and a Linux port to the 300 series mainframes (someone was very bored) are not exactly the sorts of goodies that have a Linux pundit hopping up and down, but they provide real, solid bases for businesses looking at Linux for critical tasks. Not that IBM is incapable of splashy software: its remarkable Alphaworks project has contributed rather nifty stuff to the Java and XML communities (pretty much all of which runs on Linux).

Besides contributing to free Linux software, IBM has been supporting Linux with its popular and well respected commercial offerings ("nobody ever got fired for buying IBM"). IBM has made moves in that direction from both the hardware end, such as the Thinkpad, to the software end, such as the subject of this article: DB2.