– by Robin ‘roblimo’ Miller –

A few days ago I got an email with the subject header “IBM Linux Kernel Development Positions” that opened with the line, “My name is Robert Kemp and I recruiter [sic] representing IBM in Beaverton, Oregon. I came across your name at the linuxjournal.com website.” If IBM is sending out recruiting spam to people whose names and email addresses it has harvested from Linux Web sites — or is trying to headhunt journalists for kernel development jobs — IBM is a long way from “taking over” Linux. Let’s assume this was the act of a single IBM employee acting on his own initiative, not corporate policy. It still sucks.

After the first sentence (above) the email continued,

I know
that you are extremely busy so, please forgive my intrusion. As you might
have heard IBM is developing a world-wide virtual development team inside
of IBM working within the Linux community. Our goal is to utilize our
world-class IBM programming resources and IBM’s best-of-breed software
technology to actively accelerate the maturation of Linux as an enterprise
operating system. Currently we’re involved in the journaled file systems,
networking, S/390 support, logical volume manager, SMP performance,
scheduler performance, the IA-64 port of Linux, print work in both Linux
and Samba, PowerPC bring-up, probe tools for kernel debugging, glibc,
mathlibs, TCP/IP, testing and information development, internationalization
support, the Linux Standards Base and Linux cluster installation.

So, to make a long story short. If you or anyone you know would be
interested in a position with IBM here in Beaverton, Oregon or possibly
offsite work, please send me your resume at your earliest convenience. I
would greatly appreciate it.

I am really interested in talking with anyone who has experience with Linux
kernel development involving C programming experience, significant
expertise in one or more kernel areas such as: scheduling, device support,
I/O or multi-processor (SMP and/or NUMA) systems is a plus.

I have no experience or training in any of these areas, and I’m quite happy working for OSDN, but I replied anyway. I wanted to find out why IBM was sending me recruiting spam out of the (big) blue.

My email to Robert Kemp, senior staffing specialist/technical recruiter, IBM eServers, said:

Robert,

I’m curious. In what context did you come across my name on
the linuxjournal.com website, and what kind of job did you
have in mind for me?

Cheers,

– Robin Miller

To which Kemp responded,

Hi Robin,

Thanks for your response. I located your name at
[URL].
Attached is a hotsheet of jobs that IBM has open locally here in
Portland, Oregon. Please let me know if you happen to see any jobs that
might be of interest.

(See attached file: HotjobsFeb.doc)

Also, feel free to visit our website at www.ibm.com for more exciting IBM
jobs ..

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks,

Rob Kemp

Yeah, I still had the same question I had in the beginning: Why is IBM sending me headhunting spam meant for software engineers and developers? If you look at the Linux Journal Speakers Bureau page from which our friend Rob Kemp harvested my name and email — the URL mentioned a few paragraphs back — you might notice that the first words on it say,

Linux advocate and Linux-oriented
journalist since 1996. *Not* a developer;
I am the equivalent of a sportswriter in
the Open Source development community,
the guy who can’t hit big-league pitching
but has a good handle on the players,
the teams, and what’s generally going on.

After I got done laughing at the fact that IBM not only had trouble telling the difference between a journalist and a kernel developer, and the fact that they had sent their “hotjobs” list as an attachment in .doc format, I fired up StarOffice and read said attachment. As I suspected, not a single job shown was for a reporter or editor.

If a smart recruiter wanted names and email addresses of almost every Linux kernel developer, I can think of several great places to find them, and if you’ve been developing, writing about or using Linux for any length of time you probably know exactly where I’m talking about. (I’m not going to mention any of these spots here; I do not want to be responsible for unleashing a tide of headhunting spam on kernel developers.) But a recruiter Linux-hip enough to know how to find kernel developers in (shall we say) their native habitat wouldn’t be spamming. He or she would know better.

IBM may be investing more than a billion dollars in Linux development, but apparently many people at IBM haven’t yet realized that there is a specific Linux and Open Source culture that has its own ways of doing things. Until IBM figures this out, the chances of the company “taking over” Linux development in any meaningful way is exactly zero.

Hewlett-Packard hired Bruce Perens essentially as a native guide to Linux Country. It was a wise move, one that not only gave HP Linux credibility it couldn’t have gotten by spending 100 times Bruce’s salary in advertising, but one that may help HP avoid serious gaffes like sending recruiting spam to random email addresses found on popular Linux and Open Source Web sites.

Perhaps IBM should consider hiring its own Perens-style in-house Linux guru to help its management people — and its recruiters — deal effectively with Linux and Open Source developers .

Come to think of it, I know someone who might be perfect for that job. And if someone appropriate at IBM sent me an email requesting an introduction to that person, I just might arrange it.

But first, please stop the recruiting spam. It’s bad enough when this sort of junk comes from penny-ante hustlers. A world-class corporation like IBM resorting to this tactic makes me as sad as I’d feel if I learned that Microsoft had decided to make its own proprietary version of the Java programming language instead of using the same Java used by everyone else in the world, including IBM.

NewsForge editors read and respond to comments posted on our discussion page.

Nandotimes: From the good news department: “Shares of Amazon.com climbed more than 26 percent Monday after a published report said the online retailer plans to form a strategic alliance with Wal-Mart Stores Inc.”

“Last week, we had a look at the concept of TCP Wrappers from the theoretical
perspective. As we have already mentioned, TCP Wrappers isn’t meant to fulfill the
security measures you would want for an enterprise network. But it surely does fall
into the greater scheme of rule sets that would make up a comprehensive strategy to
protect an enterprise network. The author of TCP Wrappers mentions this stating,
that TCP Wrappers could be made use of along with a firewall box on your
corporate gateway with minimum services running. While building a firewall, we
suggest, that you pipe all the firewall logging off the gateway. Although complicated
to set up, this is the best way to secure your logs incase your firewall machine is
compromised.” From FreeOS.com.

“In between
his two to three hours of
homework every night,
16-year-old Julian
Missig plays the part of a
software project
manager at
SourceForge.net, a Web site-cum-watering hole for
programmers looking for a place to hack.” More of the feature on SoureForge (a sister site of NewsForge’s) at Salon.com.

“Last Aug. 14, I predicted in our cover story “Linux Slugfest” that
Caldera and Red Hat would be the only major Linux distributors left
standing (see Linux SlugFest). Anyone still want a piece of that bet? I
didn?t think so.” Read on at ZDNET.

Businessweek: “Former patent attorney Charles H. Cella is something
of a zealot. He believes the exponential growth in patent
filings is causing an overextended U.S. Patent &
Trademark Office (PTO) to grant an increasing number
of patents that are far too broad or fail to make
significant advances in technology. So he set out to find
a way to help overturn patents of the sort that he
believes should never have been issued.”

– By Julie Bresnick –

Open Source people
Twenty-two year old Murray Stokely is one of 200 or so “committers”
to
FreeBSD.
“Committer” is a tier below “core” team member, and one tier above
“read
only,” in the FreeBSD access tree. It’s a term derived from the CVS
commit command, which is used to bring new changes into the CVS
repository. Committers are those granted write access to the CVS tree.

Originally from Jacksonville, Florida, Stokely had never left the
East Coast before moving to Pleasant
Hill, California, six days after his graduation from Nease High
School, to work for Walnut Creek CDROM. He
wasn’t nervous about the move, wasn’t reluctant, he just packed up his
bags and flew to the other coast where he resumed life as an adult. No four- or five-year transition via college bars and canceled appointments with career counselors, no second job necessary to supplement income while he pursued a dream job. He simply started right where he wanted to be. As far as leaving home goes, he was ready. He goes back to see his family several times a year but as for a future in the Florida,
he couldn’t see it. Plus he was getting some good offers.

He’s pursuing a B.A. at night now but it’s really just for the sake
of personal betterment.

“I’ve been offered six figure jobs since just out of high school, so
I don’t really see the degree as a path toward work but it’s important to
me to keep learning.” If he continues on his current trajectory he should
be boasting a bachelor’s degree in theoretical math within the next two
years. Unlike the way he develops software, which he can focus on into the
witching hour, his higher education is more of a meander through the pages of a
course catalogue. He has taken classes in cultural geography,
anthropology, linguistics, speech, just about every science you can
think of. The only subject he’s reluctant to tackle is film because all the
people he’s known who took it don’t like the silly films anymore. He’s
not so sure he’s ready to give up the joys of slapstick.

He is voracious more than ambitious. When explaining the difference
between a core contributor and a committer he refers to the core
members with adulation. At first he is credulous, “I could never be one of
them, they are the best.” But when I question it on him he is quick to
concede, “plus, I wouldn’t really want all that administrative burden.” As a
kid, he was more into art than he was technology but once he learned PASCAL,
started BBS-ing, he switched tracks and tearing through every O’Reilly book he
could get his hands on.

Nobody else in his family is technical, which is why Mr. Stokely was
shocked when his son handed him not only the $400 phone bill Murray
racked up using his new modem, but the money to pay for it, too. The elder Stokeley had bought a PC for Murray when he was in middle school. Murray learned the rest on
his own and started, in addition to the standard high school rigmarole, a small
Web design and development company. He had been using Linux until other
projects and requests led him to BSD, which in turn led Walnut Creek to him.

“I discovered BSD in 1996 when I was asked to help maintain an
archive on the world’s busiest public Internet site, ftp.cdrom.com (now
ftp.freesoftware.com). I began writing PERL scripts to search out and
delete commercial software, create HTML indices of the files ours
contained, and provide an online archive-viewer that allowed users to sample the
artwork in a collection before downloading the whole thing, etc… I
became very familiar with emacs and PERL in a FreeBSD environment at that time
and the amount of stress that this machine was putting up with was really
impressive. At the time the machine was handling over 2000
simultaneous users on a single Pentium Pro 200.

“Eventually Walnut Creek CDROM, the company behind ftp.cdrom.com,
recognized the work I was going on the ftp site and offered me a job.
When I first started working at Walnut Creek CDROM I was still using Linux
but after a couple more months I was cured of that once and for all.”

He likes FreeBSD, too, for its structure, because it’s complete OS instead of a
kernel, and because the development model, which involves notification when committing new code. The code can be submitted by anybody but must be committed by an elected member.

After officially adopting the name FreeBSD and essentially starting
a stand-alone project, FreeBSD co-founder Jordan K. Hubbard contacted
Walnut Creek CDROM in the interest of developing stronger distribution
channels. More than producing FreeBSD’s CDs, Walnut Creek became a strong
supporter of the burgeoning Open Source operating system, eventually merging in March of
2000, with FreeBSD’s corporate counterpart, Berkeley Software Development,
to become BSDi.

So now Stokely gets to work with some of his most respected committers
and core member colleagues like Hubbard, who is vice president of Open Source Solutions for BSDi. Stokely himself spends days working on writing device drivers for
FreeBSD, micromanaging the production of CDs for shipment, quality
assurance, FreeBSD snapshots and manages tech support team that helps
clients get FreeBSD installed.

Between school, work, and his live-in girlfriend, he doesn’t even
have time to maintain a personal Web page anymore. It’s a pace he enjoys so
much that he refuses to buy a television knowing full well that if he does
he’ll do nothing but watch it. At this rate he spends his free time reading,
going to museums, day hiking, traveling, and, of course, long nights
coding.

Murray Stokely’s favorites

Favorite place: Yosemite National Park.

Recent books:The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism
Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else, by Hernando De
Sotto, and History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission.
Vol 1 : The New World 1939-1946, by Richard G. Hewlett, Oscar E. Jr.
Anderson.

Favorite all time books:Catch 22, Brave New World, 1984.

Favorite television show: The Simpsons!!!

Computer game: Has stayed away since high school. Last game he
played was Warcraft II.

Next big hike: Mt. Diablo in Concord, Calif.

NewsForge editors read and respond to comments posted on our discussion page.

CBS reports that Hotmail, the popular web-based email provider, is divulging user information. Opting out is done by a checkbox at sign-up time, but it seems many peoplea re missing it, raising privacy concerns.

Anonymous Reader writes “Quick, how many MP3 files are on your system? How many words are in this article? How many lines of code are in that project? How much physical memory is in your system? All of those questions can be answered quickly with the “wc” command.

Read the full tip at http://www.linuxlookup.com/html/main/totw.html“

Fairfax IT investigates and explains why International Business Machines (IBM) is investing over a billion US dollars into Linux.