In a presentation made in Stuttgart, Germany, Andreas Plescheck, IBM’s head for Open Source and Linux technical sales across North East Europe, made the following statement regarding their involvement with Open Source:

“IBM has cancelled their contract with Microsoft as of October this year. That means that IBM will not use Windows Vista for their desktops. Beginning from July, IBM employees will begin using IBM Workplace on their new, Red Hat-based platform. Not all at once - some will keep using their present Windows versions for a while. But none will upgrade to Vista.”

The question that remains to be responded is: only IBM in Germany will switch to Linux, or IBM world wide? Because if it’s IBM’s world wide, then Microsoft lost two things: no more direct licensing revenues and the fact that other companies will try to switch to Linux, following IBM.

But it seems that this statement was kind of denied by IBM, who said that indeed, there are desktops using IBM Workspace Client, who runs both Windows and Linux programs like Eclipse and OpenOffice.org. But because OpenOffice.org it’s not fully implemented, they are considering Vista and are still maintaining business relations with Microsoft, and they don’t want to comment on the rumor that the contract with Microsoft for MS Office was terminated.