International Business Machines Corporation
is the second largest by revenue (just behind
just ahead of Hewlett-Packard),
and largest by employee numbers,
information technology company in the world.
The company provides a huge range of computer and information-technology
hardware, software, and services.
The company was originally founded in 1899
as the "Herman Hollerith and the Tabulating Machine Company",
and incorporated 1911,
initially as the
"Computing Tabulating Recording Corporation" (CTR),
before adopting its current name in
1924.
IBM is headquartered in
Armonk,
New York,
has 8 research laboratories around the world, and has employees or consultants in 170
different countries.
IBM is listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker IBM.
The company employs approximately 355,766 people,
had revenues of US $91.4, and net income of US $9.4 billion
as of 2006.
IBM is particularly famous for its research. The company holds more
patents than any other US technology,
and, as already mentioned, has 8 research laboratories around the world.
IBM employees have won 3 Nobel prizes, 4 Turing Awards, 5 National Medals
of Technology, and 5 National Medals of Science.
In recent years, IBM has made
some major contributions to
open source
software generally, and the Linux kernel in particular.
The company began support Linux
in 1998,
and has opened an IBM Linux Technology Center which employs 300 Linux kernel developers.
Other IBM contributions to
open source,
include the Eclipse development framework, and Apache Derby, a Java-based database management system.
In 2003,
IBM was sued by SCO for US $1 billion (later upped to $3 billion,
then $5 billion), for alleged breaches of UNIX licensing agreements, and for alleged intellectual
property issues, both relating to IBM's contributions to and activities with, Linux.
IBM has denied the allegations, defended that lawsuit, and in fact filed its own counterclaims against
SCO that same year.
Although the lawsuit is not yet resolved at the time of writing (Summer
2007),
IBM's vigorous legal defense of
Linux,
the GPL,
and open source,
has been welcomed by, and won plaudits from, large sections of the
open source
community.
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