New IBM/Linux Commercial

I just saw IBM's new advertising campaign for Linux today and I thought that it was something worth sharing. See the commercial by visiting the following link:
http://www-3.ibm.com/e-business/doc/con ... odigy.html

That was very good, yes (in fact, I didn't know where it was going, but I said to myself halfway through it -- That has to be IBM)...but my favorite today was the Bud Light commercial in the limo with the dog FiFI -- I'm still laughing on that one!

Times are changing. IBM looked down apon Linux as the poor cousin of AIX (umm... AIX is UNIX by IBM right?).

It doesn't stop there. Novell is phasing out NetWare in favour of Linux running Novell services such as eDirectory (a fantastic product).

On a similar note, Apple adopted BSD* as the platform for OS X.

BSD is actually UNIX, but does come in at least two open-source versions.

Well, it's not so much that they "looked down" upon Linux, as they did not see it as a business opportunity. Let's face facts, the company must make money to stay solvent. Now, times have changed and Open Source in general is being embraced a great deal more.
I would mention though, that IBM has been involved in the Open Source community for a long time.
Did you know that many of the Apache developers are paid IBM employees whose sole responsibility lie with Apache? It's not the only project IBM is involved in, and use to "give back" as much as they withdraw.
It takes bold vision to see the value in giving something away, especially if you are a fortune 500 company.

Netware 5 was really nothing more than X-windows on top of Linux anyway. A move such as that does not surprise me.

Apple did not adopt BSD per se... OS X is not truly BSD, though it does use many components and is considered a close cousin.
Mach is actually a microkernel developed at Carnegie-Mellon around 1985, IIRC. I think the project actually phased out in 1994, however others took up the gauntlet, Uof U I think.
The concept is a small kernel with 'servers', or bunches of smaller programs to make up the 'kernel' we are used to. The reason it's associated with BSD, is the CMU folks used BSD in a port for the first microkernel.
Darwin is a branch of BSD proper -- sans kernel.
As for *BSD's, there are quite a few branches.
OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, PicoBSD (minor), SecureBSD (minor), and TrustedBSD (minor). For all I know there might even more.
Cheers.

So I just saw the new ad featuring "Prodigy", the kid who is Linux in those ads, that will air during the Superbowl.

The ad features a young boy, the "Prodigy," being educated by experts from various fields, played by celebrities including Muhammed Ali and Penny Marshall. The boy is a metaphor for Linux, and the educators are metaphors for the many experts who have contributed to making Linux the fastest-growing server operating system in the industry and the world's most popular open source software.

Pretty thematic. It will be at http://www.ibm.com/open at halftime.

Cheers.