IBM partnering with Canonical

IBM, Canonical, Red Hat, and Novell announced earlier this week that they’re working together to provide a Microsoft-free computing solution to companies. I’m largely indifferent to Red Hat and Novell (sorry Fedora and SuSE fans), but I have to admit that I’m happy that IBM is working with Canonical. I turned my Thinkpad into a dual boot Ubuntu / Windows machine over a year ago, and these days I spend most of my time booted into Ubuntu.

It looks the concrete first step is to get Lotus Symphony 1.1 into the official Ubuntu repositories toward the end of August, plus adding in the IBM Open Client Solution (essentially a Notes client) around the same time. It’s a somewhat small first step, but hopefully it’ll open the door to more down the road.