Spark is a great technology, for sure. I was hesitant to get into Spark because I have lots of experience writing Hadoop map reduce apps. Then I decided a while back to base all of the machine learning examples in my current book project on Spark and MLlib and I am happy with that decision.

As the article mentioned, IBM certainly did validate the Linux "market." When people would ask me what was great about Linux I used to just say that IBM was investing billions in Linux, and that was an acceptable answer for people.