IBM has been busy this past week at LinuxWorld, releasing some of its supercomputing code as open source, plus partnering up with Novell to battle Microsoft’s Small Business Server and with Canonical/Ubuntu, Novell, Red Hat, and others to go after Microsoft’s hold on the desktop:

The company said its HPC Open Source Software Stack, which includes IBM’s Extreme Cluster Administration Toolkit, was its first ever contribution of open source code for supercomputing….

IBM also said it would work with Canonical/Ubuntu, Novell and Red Hat and a number of hardware partners it did not name to deliver in 2009 “Microsoft-free” PCs with Lotus Notes and Symphony. The company said integration between Linux and Microsoft desktops and the proliferation of client computing devices such as the Smartphone would provide the opportunity to finally make a noticeable dent in Microsoft’s stranglehold on the desktop.

It remains to be seen whether smaller companies will want IBM’s Lotus software. When I was with a start-up that used it I found it to be clunky, and our IT department (that is, “Jim”) found it cumbersome, causing us to dump it for Exchange).

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