I'd say one of the worst things a start-up (or any company for that matter) could do is tie their core business to a proprietary hosted technology -- free or not. The nice thing about most cloud hosting is incremental scaling for open and free technologies. So, it's not a complete nightmare to move elsewhere. What is someone to do when they realize that WebShere isn't a perfect match, or costs too much?
I think it's just IBM technology in general. So if you need DB/2 or MQSeries or whatever. No reason not to use commercial technology if it does what you need for less than you would need to cobble it together from MySQL and DBus...
This may not be very useful for most startups who don't develop for IBM ecosystem. Similar program by Microsoft, called BizSpark, is very useful. If you haven't already check that out.
I don't know anyone in their right mind who would start building a new system around WebSphere in the first place, free or not. Is it even running on Java 1.5 yet?
It is, but it took them a couple years to get there after Sun's first GA release. Of course, it likely requires an IBM JVM, at least if you want support.
The first hit is free, kid.
Yeah. Since no start-up in its right mind would pay $20K/CPU or whatever for Websphere, there's no opportunity loss for IBM to give it away. And, the successful companies will face a switching cost three years from now if they don't want to pay hundreds of thousands to IBM.
nit-pick: shouldn't it be "I.B.M.'s Bid..." ?
Also, who on earth still writes I.B.M. ?? The company itself certainly doesn't.
The _New York Times_ has an idiosyncratic style guide; they follow each letter with a period when the letters are pronounced individually. So, "I.B.M", "C.I.A.", but "NATO".
(Naturally, how IBM itself spells its name is of no interest.)