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IBM

More Open Source and Linux Support from IBM 79

Posted by Roblimo from the by-George-I-think-they've-got-it dept.
Neville writes "IBM moved its developerworks out of beta and launched it with a new Open Source Zone. Current open source projects include jikes, a java compiler that works blazingly fast in Debian, BSD, and RH. Jikes is tres cool - as usual, IBM actually implements java better than Sun. Maybe this is what it takes to finally get java and linux to mesh, and maybe I can finally convert my last Solaris x86 box to linux. They also offer a Linux Zone with info on Python and GNOME. "
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More Open Source and Linux Support from IBM More

More Open Source and Linux Support from IBM

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  • Back in the 70's and 80's, IBM was like a tyrannical, abusive father, but it has turned out to be one hell of a cool grandfather...

  • IBM could carry the Java torch (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    IBM, thanks for supporting Linux with a speedy JIT-enabled VM (see The latest Volano Report [volano.com]). But you could help out the entire Java world by licensing/GPL'ing the JIT for other platforms?

    Just thinking out loud: Wouldn't it be great if you could get from IBM a GPL'ed VM and JIT for all known platforms? Instead of every platform rolling their own port, they could check out the VM code, make changes for their platform, and then check it back in. This is what, IMO, Java should have been - all one source - both VM and JIT.

    Then Java would really run everywhere and it would run fast!

  • Knowledge is power -- knowledge shared is power lost. -- Aleister Crowley.
    This comment get to the heart of the divide between big companies and open source / free software / whatever (and capitalise those terms to taste, btw):

    Although big companies are primarily about making as much money as possible, they know that to make a lot of it, power (a monopoly or other device) is required. Thus, in the long term at least, the sharing of knowledge is an anathema.

    Of course, one can make money without such motives; just not as much. In this milleu, altruism, regrettably, leads to the local, but not the global, maximum.

    So while open source is a useful tactic for small companies, at most it is a temporary ploy of large ones who are aiming for an entirely different prize.
  • As it's shaping up to be a graceful end for Netscape??

  • Balls... guts...? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I kinda prefer the chinese alternative to the expressions...

    IBM has big bladder.

    Hey, that would fit the mental image of a Big Blue having occasional incontinence problems...

    Expect the trickle of Big Blue's Open Source projects turn into a torrent as the _floodgates_ open.

  • Also, IBM has some excellent bottom line reasons for wanting MS's lock on the desktop to be broken, not the least of which are all those license fees they're paying MS. I'll bet IBM is one of Bill's biggest customers, and perhaps the most reluctant.

    They've figured out this Open Source thing pretty quickly, not that they only learned about it in the last five years, of course. This never could have happened under the Watsons or Akers, BTW.

  • I agree with most of those comments. I particularly liked the approach to patents - it really does make the licence orthogonal to the patent status, and makes that explicit. Explicit is good.

    I see one problem with the licence, though. It covers, very clearly, what I can do with the program itself, and with modified forms of the program; but it says incredibly little about what I can do in terms of taking parts of the program and using them in my own different programs.

    If programs containing some IPL'd code count as derivative works of the IPL'd program and have to have the "Copyright IBM" notice on them, that's actually quite a lot less friendly than the GPL. I think that section of the licence would benefit from revision (if I've understood it correctly) or explanation (if I haven't).

    I suppose if IBM are being as Good as people seem to think, I should just contact them and say this to their face. Anyone want to tell me whether I'm talking rubbish before I do so?

  • AFAIK this #!/usr/bin/env trick originated in the Python universe. May be that the python people care more about portability and thus produce clever ideas like this one. ;-)
  • I must note that there's one possible reason that /usr/bin/env is not used more often in the Perl universe. Try starting a script out with "#!/usr/bin/env perl -w". No joy, at least on the Linux and HP-UX boxen where I tried it. Works okay on FreeBSD. I believe that the disconnect comes in the way the loaders on the non-BSD systems package up the arguments for execution. Not as portable as one might think, at least in that case. Still a nifty trick, though.
  • >>This never could have happened under the Watsons or Akers, BTW.

    I have to agree with this whole heartedly. IBM now has a CEO who is not in love with technology. He is not interested in creating proprietary standards. His only driving force is delivering 'solutions' to customers.

    He is a man who became frustrated with IS companies who only wanted to talk about how fast their latest gizmo was. He didn't care. He wants to know how it can help him do his job better. That (not so) subtle point has revitalized this company. The 'not invented here' syndrome is gasping for its last dying breath within IBM. It's not about where it came from, it's about "how can we use this to enhance our customer's business."

    Open Source and Linux fit well in with this new ideology. IBM can twist OS in all different directions to better support customers; whereas, they can't touch Windows without consent from Microsoft.
  • Open source code greatly reduces the ability of a company to screw a user community. IBM has been doing some good things lately, so why not forgive them some of their past sins and thank them for their participation?
  • I use jikes only for the development cycle, for production it is always javac. I did not look into the matter, but I noticed that my application consumes much more memory if compiled with jikes. Its also somewhat slower. Additionally jikes compiled classes break my obfuscator. Anyway for quick compile/test/debug cycles you can't beat jikes.

    just my 2c

    Thomas
  • Why don't they open source OS/2?
    Why?

    First, they're still making money off it now, just not in the end-user fat-client space.

    Second, it includes code copyrighted by Microsoft, Adobe, and others, which are covered by all sorts of different licenses to IBM. That makes release a legal nightmare.
  • Isn't the Workplace Shell the part of OS/2 that IBM is most "single-handedly" responsible for, and the part that Microsoft and other companies had the least involvement in? It would be wonderful if this was the case, because the WPS is the part of OS/2 that would be the coolest and most useful to see made freely available.
  • Yes, some of us do have just as philosophical as pragmatic bents, and are annoyed by ESR's focus on the utilitarian to the exclusion of the moral. Obviously I'm including myself in this. My point was that "we" do not all share a monolithic opinion on anything, except that we want to live in a world where software doesn't suck. The cohesion comes from voluntary cooperation, and that's good enough for me.
  • writes it's most important java tool (the compiler) in java. *please* - yes java is cool, but don't push it. surely they could put in that extra effort to write an ansi c or c++ compiler to save hundreds of hours of developer's times.
    i suppose real developers have already found a better compiler.

  • IBM's license (and other ruminations...) (Score:3)

    by trims ( 10010 ) on Tuesday September 28, 1999 @12:03PM (#1652700) Homepage

    One of the things I like most about IBM's Open Source moves is the license.

    This isn't a "It should be BSD/GPL/MPL" post. I'm not going to discuss which is "better" (ther is no answer). Instead, I think the the IBM license is almmost optimal for a commercial organization that wants to contribute to Open Source.

    Why do I say this? Well, it not only is quite friendly to other licenses, it also adresses two critical issues for companies: Patent Licensing and assumed Liability. These are not really well defined in most of the other Open Source licenses. IBM did a good job with it.

    I'd really like to see the Open Source community rally around 3 or 4 licenses. Rather than having the huge proliferation that we have now, I think it would be really beneficial to have a couple of licenses, each tailored to a specific group. That is, make a definative statement about the goals each of the 3-4 licenses, and really, really encourage (with a bat, if necessary (wink,wink)) companies to pick one of them, rather than make their own. I think the IBM license is good enough that it should be one of the 3-4 (I'll leave the other choices for you to war over...)

    Now, I'd be really happy if IBM created a Open Source highly-tuned VM/java library set....

    -Erik

  • See subject

    :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-)

    --

  • Although I have not read the article I have recently started to do some Java programming. I have found that Java is pretty cool. The GUI is a bit slow, but command line is not that bad for the most part. There is one thing that I do want to caution you about Java if you are not aware, and that is its implementation of threads.

    To share memory in Java you use a method called synchronized. This locks the memory that you want to share between threads. However the thread will continue to try to get this lock forever unlike C where you give it a value to 'time out'. There is no time limit in Java that you set or any way of makeing it time out. Thus if a thread already has a lock on memmory and another thread tries to get that memory it will wait and wait and wait forever until the app is killed possible causeing a dead lock situation. Other than that I have found going from C to Java a real thrill. It is very easy to learn once you understand what an object is as everything in Java is an object.

    Cool that there will be faster virtual machines thou. This and the faster computers will surely make Java a more likeable programming language.

  • I also applaud IBM's foray into the OSD model.

    This is welcome change from the days of yore, when IBM was the Big Bad Wolf (I've got the grey hairs to prove it!). They were a *real* juggernaut, right down to the having the most hard-nosed, market-dominating sales model I had seen, until Microsoft came along (they could teach even IBM some tricks in the market domination game).

    Now I have an IBM TP600 (Linux) laptop and several IBM disk drives, all of which are excellent, competitive products that I would be hard-pressed to replace.

    Good Job, IBM, and PLEASE keep up the good work!!!

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Finally! This would/will be really cool - a platform-independent language makes no sense if it is really slow or simply doesn't work on a major computing platform...
  • It always strikes me that IBM, perceived as the Big Brother for the last 15 years, is in reality a really great company that does a lot of cool stuff.
    -- The word "woman" is not politically correct any longer.

  • Building Jikes (Score:3)

    by DonkPunch ( 30957 ) on Tuesday September 28, 1999 @10:47AM (#1652710) Homepage Journal
    FWIW, I grabbed Jikes a little while ago as soon as I heard about it. If you don't know, Jikes is a Java bytecode compiler, not a virtual machine. It won't make Java run faster on your Linux box (the alphaworks JIT JVM 1.1.8 is what you want for speed, but it's not open-source).

    Jikes stresses compliance to Sun's published standards. It was kind of interesting to read through the source and find comments where they had run into contradictions in the standard. Beyond that, Jikes also reportedly compiles Java really quickly.

    I built Jikes from source on a SuSE 6.0 install with a 2.2.9 kernel. I was pretty impressed with how well they set up the make -- it detected compiler options and built with no problems. Word of warning, though, it took several minutes on my P166 with 64 meg.

    All I can say is that IBM is impressing the heck out of me these days. My sincere thanks for releasing such a strong compiler under an open license.
  • > Maybe this is what it takes to finally get Java and Linux to mesh
    Are all the pieces available for a full open-source Java on Linux environment? Let's see:

    Jikes is the compiler
    Kaffe is the runtime (or maybe Japhar)
    classpath.org is the core libraries

    Blackdown is probably the choice for a pure Sun-derived implementation, but they've fallen a little bit behind the Sun release schedule. Is there enough need for Java-on-linux to provide a business justification for a full-fledged, funded, kickass Linux Java implementation?

    Disclaimer: I've built some Java VM technology, using Linux as a development base

  • IBM JVM Kudos (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Kudos to IBM for their JVM. Faster, reliable, small mem (6 megs). It is definitely the best JWM for linux. Now if only RH would do something this right instead of spending all its time making base rpm packages dependent on Gnome rpms and shoving its "partners" packages down our throats.
  • It really takes guts for a company as big and entrenched as IBM to do something like this. I really respect what they've done for the Linux community. When we dominate the world, IBM will be with us! >;)
    I'd almost like to see IBM in an even more prominent role in hardware and software. I'm not talking about a monopoly, but as an equal to both Intel and MS. It'll take a very large hardware company to take Intel down to the notch they deserve to be in. As for MS, they're on their way out and Linux is on its way in. IBM has seen the writing on the wall. It's a good time to be involved in Open Source.

  • IBM, java & jikes (Score:3)

    by sohp ( 22984 ) <(moc.oi) (ta) (notwens)> on Tuesday September 28, 1999 @10:43AM (#1652714) Homepage
    I learned about jikes a few months ago at my (NT-based) employer and was pleased to discover that it also ran on my RedHat Linux box at home, and yes, it IS fast. So fast I had to check to make sure that it actually compiled the files. The difference is that sun's javac is implemented mostly in java itself, while jikes is C++ (owch)

    At the same time I discovered IBM's JDK for Linux , and I prefer it over Blackdown. The IBM jdk requires native threads, so if that's an issue get the Blackdown green threads jdk. (It's at 1.1.8, I hope their 1.2 shows up soon).

    For you Visual Age fans, IBM has a Linux version available for preview now also.

    IBM may be be the best Java tools company out there.

  • jikes (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Jikes produces terrible bytecode. Try gcj, it also works great on Linux: http://sourceware.cygnus.com/java [cygnus.com].

    Note gcj doesn't yet support inner classes or most 1.2 features... for those jikes is still your best bet.

  • Now, first of all, I want to make something clear: I love jikes. It is blazingly fast, and the obvious choice during the develop/test/debug cycle. Plus I like its error messages on incorrect code better than Javac's.

    However, I have a contention with the following statement: "IBM actually implements java better than Sun"

    If this is a comment on Jikes (as opposed to, for example, IBM's JIT compiler), its a misleading comment. Jikes and Javac are like apples and oranges. Jikes was designed to be a fast java compiler, plain and simple. This means that it does few optimizations to the output bytecode when compared to Javac. Which in turn means that Jikes-produced code may execute more slowly than Javac-produced code.

    (I say might because a good JIT compiler may be able to perform the same optimizations that Javac does on the output from Jikes, thus making the usefulness of Javac's work moot)

    So lets just keep these sorts of issues in mind when discussing compilers.

    That said, YAY IBM!

  • What it took . . . (Score:3)

    by fireproof ( 6438 ) on Tuesday September 28, 1999 @10:44AM (#1652717) Homepage
    IBM has done a lot of good stuff since getting knocked off of their pedestal back in the day. (Well, except that they didn't marker OS/2 very well). I often wonder if even (gasp) Microsoft could be "good" if they ever realized that they aren't the only option in the computing world.
  • So it looks like a lot of people are gushing about how cool IBM has become, what with Java and Linux and OSS and whatnot. Unfortunately, while they may have shed their Big Brother exterior, IBM remains what it has always been - a parasitic predator whose only goal in life is to get obscenely wealthy by feeding off the computer industry. They are only supporting Linux/OSS because 1) it pisses Microsoft off, 2) they see money in it.

    So let's not get all dreamy about dominating the world and taking IBM with us. In the world that we want to build, information is free, which goes against every tenet of their corporate culture.
  • For a company the size of IBM, they have turned to support OSS/Linux remarkably quickly. Unlike Sun who can't seem to relinquish control (witness their community source licence), IBM is actually willing to offer us (some of their) crown jewles.

    Of course the fact that IBM has lots of (technological) crown jewels probably made this decision easier for them. Still, they have put their money where their mouth is. I hope that the Linux community appreciates their contributions and rewards them, be in with money or simply mindshare. A decent Java implementation would do much to further demonstrate the enterprise-readiness of Linux ...


  • Jikes Open Source (Score:4)

    by whig ( 6869 ) on Tuesday September 28, 1999 @10:54AM (#1652720) Homepage Journal
    As the Debian maintainer for Jikes, I have been incredibly impressed with IBM's serious adoption of Open Source. With the original Jikes release, there were problems with the license which prevented it from being included in Debian's main distribution. When these problems were brought to IBM's attention, they immediately agreed to get their lawyers to work on a revision. The end result is that Debian now has a completely free Java implementation available for those who can accept the limitations of Kaffe's runtime library, and a truly fast and robust alternative to Sun's javac even for those who use the JDK runtime.
  • GCC 2.95 (with libgcj) now has support for compiling (non-graphical) Java code to native binaries. If you had hoped Jikes would do this, well, look into GCJ at

    Cygnus [cygnus.com]

    and try using it. The binaries are indeed much faster than loading up a JVM, parsing bytecode, running it...

    Jikes, on the other hand, compiles Java to bytecode much faster than javac. On the order of 10 to 100 *TIMES* faster. Use it instead of javac.

  • "My point was that "we" do not all share a monolithic opinion on anything, except that we want to live in a world where software doesn't suck."

    Too true.. ;)

    Of course, as was pointed out to me quite recently, perhaps we should learn to disagree, as it were. We're all going to hold wildly different opinions, but as long as the end goals of all parties are being achieved, I suppose it doesn't really matter.

    Hmm. New (?) slogan: "GNU/Linux: Modular programs for modular people."

    Naturally you could replace "GNU/Linux" with Free Software, Open Source Software, or whatever buzz word/term you feel to be appropriate.

    Of course, I'm sure many people would have no end of fun thinking up a counterpart slogan for Windows.. Hee hee..

  • And this is a bad thing?

  • Well, sometimes, anyway. "agree to disagree", I meant to say. Beyond that.. too much noise, not enough signal from me today. Time to sleeeep.. *cheers all around*

  • thanks for the kind words (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 28, 1999 @01:38PM (#1652728)
    Hi, I'm in Austin, TX. Today was the end of IBM's first "Linux Summit". There will be more... If you have a problem with Jikes, visit us at http://ibm.com/developerworks/opensource and use the Jitterbug system to report it. We'll try to fix it ASAP. By the way, the machine that serves up the Jikes Project Pages from dW is running RH Linux 6.0, from outside the IBM firewall. We plan to open up the CVS tree for write-access from outside IBM soon. We want to wait until we get v1.07 out, as Philippe is currently making (lots of) changes needed to get the LocalVariableTable right, which will fix a known problem with debug support. Note that Jikes is now in the "free" part of Debian, is included in Red Hat's main distribution, and the license has been approved by OSI. The mail lists should be up soon. We are waiting for Ken Coar (IBM, Apache) to check out the Majordomo setup. By the way, I'm leaving soon to have dinner with the chap who manages the developerworks/opensource site. Exciting times indeed, and who would have thunk it...from IBM. I know I wouldn't -- a year ago. Now -- I LOVE IT! Dave Shields shields@watson.ibm.com Jikes Project Core Team Member
  • I hope someone can explain this to me, but there seems to be a lot of dislike/hatred for Gnome.

    There seems to be a lot of dislike/hatred for Red Hat too. I think I know why, but really why? You *don't* need to buy Red Hat. So if you don't like what they do, that's your preference. But it's only that, a preference, there's no reason to hate RH.

    Why does there seem to be a lot of dislike/hatred for Gnome? Hard to tell. Some people don't like Gnome because they feel that it "compete's" with KDE. That KDE won't be successful because it's battling with Gnome.

    I disagree. I think Gnome helps to improve KDE. It forces KDE to always keep ahead. So to all those Gnome developers who cause *my* Desktop Environment to be improved, I offer a *big* thank you.

    -Brent
    --

  • IBM not innovative? (Score:3)

    by JordanH ( 75307 ) on Tuesday September 28, 1999 @03:59PM (#1652733) Homepage Journal
    IBM isn't all that innovative anymore.

    Excuse me?

    • Copper ICs.
    • World-class lithography and Physics research.
    • Best speech recognition software (ViaVoice)
    • Best collaboration environment (Lotus).
    • New, World Beating Servers (RS/6000 S80).
    • Storage research. World's smallest hard drive (Microdrive).
    • Huge investment in Java classes for AS/400 and OS/390.
    • Full tilt support for Open Source.
    • Huge eBusiness initiatives. Hitting eCommerce solutions in every market, every tier.

    I'm interested in hearing your example of an innovative company.

  • Free information isn't inconsistent with making money, though, at least until you can copy food as easily as software. I worked with IBM on the latest version of their Open Source licensing, and they were incredibly nice about it and easy to work with.

    Thanks

    Bruce Perens

  • As the Debian maintainer for Jikes, I have been incredibly impressed with IBM's serious adoption of Open Source.

    Why don't they open source OS/2? In a manner similiar to the initial Mozilla source release.
    This would be a graceful end for that operating system

  • IBM remains what it has always been - a parasitic predator whose only goal in life is to get obscenely wealthy by feeding off the computer industry.

    You say that like its a bad thing or something...
  • I worked with IBM folks on the latest version of their Open Source license. They are serious about Open Source, they made the effort to comply with the OSD, and they were really nice and easy people to work with.

    Thanks

    Bruce

  • Re:the Big Brother... (Score:3)

    by vyesue ( 76216 ) on Tuesday September 28, 1999 @11:04AM (#1652739)
    15 years ago IBM had a monopoly.
    cheaper and better options to IBM machines came along.
    IBM watched its monopoly crumble.
    IBM used its vast resources to become a competitive company in spite of losing their monopolistic advantage and today, they do a lot of Cool Stuff.

    is linux a better option to MicroSoft's products? you bet. is MicroSoft resourceful enough to survive losing monopolistic status, were that to occur, and produce Cool Things? I honestly hope so. I'd certainly like to see a world where a company full of money and talent contributed as much as possible. I'd much rather force MicroSoft to use their resources for the common good of the industry than see them go out of business.
  • >In the world we want to build...

    What you mean "we", kemo sabe? I see no we here. Just individuals doing what they want.

    If the tools are good, who cares where they come from?

  • Re:IBM is /not/ the nice guy (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It's undenyable that companies pursuit their own gain, but I see quite a difference between the policy IBM and SGI are pursuing towards the open source movement and what SUN is doing. IBM might be not so nice as it strives to look, but they are actually distributing code under a fairly open license (albeit not the GPL). SGI is doing the same right now (with the GPL... and this is much better!) and the support they are providing cannot be withdrawn at a later time. I think people should be a bit more pragmatic here: if we can gain something from this companies, all the better for us; otherwise they should be dumped.

  • Zoiks! (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 28, 1999 @11:05AM (#1652743)
    Personally, I'm waiting for jinkies -- the Java debugger that discovers what's behind run-time errors (and what would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for those pesky kids).
  • IBM has simply chosen to follow a path of enlightened self-interest. They built Jikes on their own dime, built OpenDX on their own dime (yes, I know full well that it was mostly to sell SP2's back in 1994, but they opened it and freely licensed the patents on the code), built a Linux JVM on their own dime, and support the Perl DBI interface on their own dime.

    It's the customers, stupid. They asked for this.
  • Er, did you raid my previous posts? ;-)

    Yes, the WPS is mostly IBM, and I really wish they would release it. Heck, SOM is CORBA based IIRC, so we could wind up with WPS-X, KDE, and Gnome interoperable and with interembeddable objects.

    Which is not the same thing as releasing OS/2 -- WPS-X on *nix probably wouldn't run any OS/2, Windows, or DOS apps without a significant porting effort. And WPS-X on a *nix wouldn't compete with OS/2 any more (or less) than Linux already does.
  • But what's so great about KDE? Redhat endorses Gnome and Suse endorses KDE. I'm not that enthused with Suse.

    *That* I'm sure I don't know :) KDE was there first. It is also more mature. I frequently switch between Gnome and KDE, Gnome has a few bugs with the version I'm using, KDE has more mature applications. Actually, I need to upgrade everything here :)

    -Brent
    --
  • IBM is doing exactly what any good business does. Find a crack in the competition and use that crack against them. IBM could not beat MS on the OS front. MS is just too strong. However, the MS business model does not permit them to enter the free software market. IBM, not being dependent upon software sales, is able to move into the OSS market and start product seeding while gaining general community goodwill. The idea is simplicity itself. Put out some software, a few tools for development and some hardware to run it all on and you have just made an end around run over MS. By the time MS gets a business strategy going about OSS, IBM will have become a part of the OSS fabric and be very difficult to remove. This is just the huge shot in the arm OSS needs. Let's not forget that the PC was considered a toy before IBM put one out.

  • Mixed feelings (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Jikes is way cool. I've been using it since it was in alpha & am very impressed. IBM-jdk1.1.7 & 1.1.8 are way cool. Fast & stable. IBM Visualage for Java is way uncool. I have never used a more unproductive tool. It is extremely bloated, the 'version control' it provides does not prevent code getting overwritten, its bytecode is sometimes screwy (can't say I've ever seen false=true in any other debugger) and it misses compile errors in inner classes. We also had events disappearing in gui classes when the classes were jar'd, but working fine unjar'd. The problem goes away when compiling external to VAJ. Ran JTest against the generated gui code in VAJ. 3/4 of the static & dynamic errors found were in the generated code. I'm happy with IBM's commitment to Java, however I wouldn't want to live in a world where inferior technology like VAJ was crammed down our throats. (Wait a minute, there's another company doing that right now! What's that name again...:>) ps. for those using Windoze, the jdk1.3 javac is comparable in speed to jikes.
  • In an otherwise fairly accurate, though gushing, article about Python, the author presents an example of a Python script, and a "contrasting" example of a Perl script. The Python script starts with the line "#!/usr/bin/env python", a common idiom in the Python world to increase portability. The Perl script, however, names the Perl interpreter directly--"#!/usr/bin/perl". The author seems to tout this as a portability feature of Python.

    Don't get me wrong--as much as I love Perl, I'm starting to fall just as much in love with Python the more I use it. It rocks. But the /usr/bin/env technique is totally independent of which interpreter you are calling. It's not so much a feature of Python as a common behavior of Python script authors. Not a biggie, but it seemed a bit, well, off.

  • Re:IBM, java & jikes (visual age) (Score:3)

    by Seth Finkelstein ( 90154 ) on Tuesday September 28, 1999 @11:07AM (#1652754) Homepage Journal
    I've been working with IBM's Visual Age for Linux, and it's definitely worth a look. The preview is free, so check it out for download [ibm.com] on IBM's site [ibm.com]

    - Seth Finkelstein

  • I am reminded about

    IBM and the short sighted rihno

    linux surport people watch out

    peace

    john
    a poor student @ bournemouth uni in the UK (a deltic so please dont moan about spelling but the content)
  • One of our dev servers blew up in the middle of that comment. Lost track of what I was saying. Oops.

  • Re:quality of compiled code? (Score:3)

    by ptomblin ( 1378 ) <ptomblin@xcski.com> on Tuesday September 28, 1999 @11:13AM (#1652757) Homepage Journal
    Wait a minute, I've developed a *lot* of Java code, and in every case I've compared jikes produces smaller class files that run faster than the same java files compiled with javac. In some cases, the speedups were incredible. And given the compile speed of jikes, and the fact that it gives *much* better diagnostics, and it implements the language spec better than javac, the extra speed at runtime is just gravy.

  • If they really had guts they would quit their idiotic posturing about GNU/Linux being a "server OS" and discontinue the "wait and see" attitude they've adopted about preinstalled GNU/Linux desktops. IBM isn't all that innovative anymore. Now they just want to keep their head above water, and prey upon new markets as they open up (rather than forging new markets.. which would be a true sign of innovation) in order to increase their market share in a predictable, methodical fashion.

    IBM doesn't care about free software or "open source" any more than Sun does. There's a reason why IBM was termed the Evil Empire before Microsoft was. They are also the company the modern-day usage of the term FUD was originally derived from. Microsoft is just as bad as they were in such a prominent position, and the same would hold true for Sun (and even IBM if they took an even stronger position amongst the Establishment once again).

  • I imagine the term "we" was meant to refer to either the free software movement, the open source software movement, or both. Some of us have more philosophical as well as pragmatic bents, and /do/ happen to care where the tools come from. Not everything is a matter of pure practicality. You end up screwing yourself if you don't think of things in more than a single perspective..

    And don't kid yourself that the FSM and OSSM are simply "just" individuals doing their own thing.. It is still a cooperative effort on a number of levels. Or else there would be no cohesion, and thus no movement.. of any kind. Anarchic "we" may be.. /completely/ unorganized "we" are not. Several groups, or projects, are certainly not just individuals, for instance.. And there are a good number of projects among the FSM and OSSM.

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