Slashdot Mirror

Anonymous Coward writes "After reading about Microsoft's successful attempt to patent style sheets, I tried typing the word "Microsoft" into the IBM patent server. It is amazing how many of these bloody things they are generating in the patent office. I selected a patent at random to see how "novel" it was and just by chance I fell on this one. It was filed May 15, 1996. " They have 25 claims with this one patent (mostly related to dragging and dropping comment files in response to articles in online magazines), with each claim being successively more inclusive. The last claim is the killer (the comments in square brackets [] are mine):

25. A subscriber system for use with an electronic magazine that is distributed from a publisher to a subscriber, the subscriber system comprising:

• a computer having a communications port coupled to a back channel to the publisher, a processor, and a display; [like a browser connecting to a web server]
• a graphical user interface executing on the processor to present a magazine screen on the display, the magazine screen containing at least one article box indicative of a magazine article; and [a browser displaying a web page]
• the graphical user interface being configured to relate time within a publishing period for the magazine to the article boxes so that when a user manipulates the graphical user interface to selectively identify different times within the publishing period, ones of the article boxes are added and removed from the screen to demonstrate which articles were published at which times within the publishing period. [clicking back and forth between back issues of Slashdot]

Anonymous Coward writes "After reading about Microsoft's successful attempt to patent style sheets, I tried typing the word "Microsoft" into the IBM patent server. It is amazing how many of these bloody things they are generating in the patent office. I selected a patent at random to see how "novel" it was and just by chance I fell on this one. It was filed May 15, 1996. " They have 25 claims with this one patent (mostly related to dragging and dropping comment files in response to articles in online magazines), with each claim being successively more inclusive. The last claim is the killer (the comments in square brackets [] are mine):

25. A subscriber system for use with an electronic magazine that is distributed from a publisher to a subscriber, the subscriber system comprising:

• a computer having a communications port coupled to a back channel to the publisher, a processor, and a display; [like a browser connecting to a web server]
• a graphical user interface executing on the processor to present a magazine screen on the display, the magazine screen containing at least one article box indicative of a magazine article; and [a browser displaying a web page]
• the graphical user interface being configured to relate time within a publishing period for the magazine to the article boxes so that when a user manipulates the graphical user interface to selectively identify different times within the publishing period, ones of the article boxes are added and removed from the screen to demonstrate which articles were published at which times within the publishing period. [clicking back and forth between back issues of Slashdot]

The Source of the Jikes Parser Generator has been released. It's hiding here. While Bison deals with LALR(1) grammars, it can generate parsers for LALR(k) grammars. David Shields also claims it makes providing good error support easier to program. In other programming news, Code Crusader 1.2.0 has been released as opensource. Anyone have any experience of this tool?

The Source of the Jikes Parser Generator has been released. It's hiding here. While Bison deals with LALR(1) grammars, it can generate parsers for LALR(k) grammars. David Shields also claims it makes providing good error support easier to program. In other programming news, Code Crusader 1.2.0 has been released as opensource. Anyone have any experience of this tool?

The Source of the Jikes Parser Generator has been released. It's hiding here. While Bison deals with LALR(1) grammars, it can generate parsers for LALR(k) grammars. David Shields also claims it makes providing good error support easier to program. In other programming news, Code Crusader 1.2.0 has been released as opensource. Anyone have any experience of this tool?

ewhac writes "In the current issue of The Bulletin (an email newsletter, pricey subscription required), it is reported that, in mid-January, Microsoft was awarded patent #5860073 on, "The use of style sheets in an electronic publishing system." The Seybold article casts doubt on the validity of the patent, citing prior art back to the 1960's, and on the competence of the US Patent and Trademark Office for awarding it. The article also calls Microsoft's motives into question for failing to mention this patent application to the World Wide Web Consortium, with whom it has been working for some time to develop a style sheet standard. Thomas Reardon, director of standards at Microsoft, claims that it will offer a "free and reciprocal" license to anyone wishing to use the technology, adding, "These are the most liberal licensing terms out there." (It would seem Reardon is not aware of the GPL.) "

Loic Dachary wrote in to say that catalog, a GPLd perl script to create your own Yahoo style directory is up for download. ja wrote in to say that LyX, TeX a frontend for dummies has officially hit v1.0 From my own blatant self promotion department, I actually registered CmdrTaco.net and have moved most of my non-slashdot stuff there- as well as cleaning up some design issues and making pages smaller and faster and prettier. Update your links, the old stuff will go away in the not so distant future. David Carver noted that the March 1999 issue of (What? Paper?) Performance Computing magazine mentions Slashdot on Page 13 regarding last Novembers reports on Cheap Alphas. For something truly strange, we have something Blaxthos sent: The Church of the Quivering Otter. It's actually even wierder than it sounds. An anonymous reader sent us a link to a CNN article about the Victoria's Secret commercial during the superbowl: Apparently the website got a million hits in the following hour. Was the game boring or do we just really like Stephenie Seymour? The answer to both of these is probably yes. Somewhat related is another patent following the one we mentioned yesterday. Rosmo sent us (Not for the ultra moral!) a patent that might be even scarier that that one.

Rogue_F writes "Always thought your digital camera, or PDA never had enough storage space for your needs? IBM may have solved this problem with their new microdrives. They may end up being too fragile and expensive, but just think of the degree of coolness it adds to something like Itsy Good things come in little packages " 340 megs in an inch? Smooth.

VinceV sent us a link to a new site he's started up called Control-Escape.com which aims to be a help site for novice linux users making the migration from those less known alternative OSs from Redmond. jedgar wrote in to announce the Feb. Edition of DaemonNews and FreeBSD 'zine, and Squeezer wrote in to say that the feb. issue of Ext2 is out. (Mention one, ya gotta mention 9 more. Sheesh *grin*) Several other folks wrote in to note that The GNOME Project has released 0.99.5. Justin Clarke wrote in to show us Rioport.com which is Diamond's new site to connect Rio owners with legal MP3s. danmil noted another Slashdot reference in the mainstream- this one is in a NY times story. Now we have a few funny bits not for the Moral and Pure: the_gimp sent us a link to what is probably the most amusing patent in recent memory. Glad that's patented. Don't want that technology uncontrolled. Somewhat related, behhl sent us a site that was bound to happen- AdultLinux. You can guess what it's for. And lastly, for the strangest bit of the day, Hans sent us a link to Furniture Porn. Fear. And hide your children.

Chris DiBona wrote in to tell as that Linux International is sporting a Big Blue new Member in the form of IBM Software They've been supporting Apache for awhile, and now DB2 comes to Linux. Wonder what else they might have in store.

Chris DiBona wrote in to tell as that Linux International is sporting a Big Blue new Member in the form of IBM Software They've been supporting Apache for awhile, and now DB2 comes to Linux. Wonder what else they might have in store.

Whizard wrote in about a new patent on realtime synchronous actions over the Internet that could applied either to games or to medical operations over the Net. The description makes it look like another exercise in patenting the obvious, but would anybody care to analyse it and give us a rundown on what is now prohibited without a license? They do happen to have a client and a server running on Linux.

Sometimes as an ex-demo coder, one sees something these days that knocks one off one's feet. So 4-bit scrolling Overscan and 16Khz Soundtracker on the 8Mhz Atari ST was cool, but it's hard to be impressed in the same way these days, given the 300Mhz monsters that run C++ faster than hand-crafted 68000.... until... Who in their right mind would code a Spectrum Emulator in Java that actually runs old games??? Not only that, but source code is provided which compiles with jikes. Interestingly the resulting class files are slower than those on the website -- some optimization cases must be being missed (hint David ;-)). Apparently, this is the beginning of a trend with an ATARI ST emulator also being written. Anyone know how to get Kaffe to run an applet? (under Netscape it runs at 10% of a real Spectrum's speed)

The OSI has sent us a report on the Open Source discussions they had with IBM. What's cool is that the opening-up of the Jikes Parser has been discussed, which would make Jikes more open, and provide a tool with better error correction capabilities than Yacc/Bison. The report is below, so people know what the fuss is about. update Dave Shields updated us on events at his end. There's a nice hacker anecdote at the end. " IBM staff and I discussed the Jikes license in a conference call on December 10. I brought up all of the problem areas that I found and that people on the net communicated to me, even those that would not effect whether or not Jikes complies with the Open Source(TM) Definition.

They said that some of the license problems are not their intent and expressed a willingness to clear them up. They say they are working on making the parser generator Open Source. Their concerns are not giving away IBM's entire patent portfolio to large companies who incorporate a single line of Jikes in their software, and not fragmenting the Java language. They are going to get more community feedback for several weeks through a Jikes-license mailing list, and they will need some time to discuss what they are doing and to prepare licenses.

Their attorney warned that licenses get longer when you try to make them "friendly" by avoiding legal jargon, but he accepted that the programmers who would contribute to Jikes should not have to consult a lawyer for interpretation before they mail in a patch.

The list of topics I brought up is attached to the end of this announcement. If you want to bring up other topics or discuss these, IBM is creating a Jikes-license discussion forum.

Bruce Perens

By order of the Open Source Initiative Board

Things I brought up:

0. Title: Need a (TM) after "Open Source".

1. Definitions:

Definition of licensed code is over-restrictive in that it limits the license to Java 1.1 compilers.

2. Grant of Rights:

* Paragraph one, the copyright license, appears to restrict the distribution of modified works to the point that those rights are granted _only_ by paragraph two, the patent license. This is because the words at the end of the paragraph, "the Program as distributed by IBM", belong after "prepare derivative works of" and not where they are in the paragraph. This increases the effect of the 60% language in paragraph two to effect the copyright license as well as the patent license.

* Paragraph two last sentence is unparseable and appears to negate the rest of the paragraph.

* Paragraph three last sentence is unparseable and appears to negate the rest of the paragraph.

* Paragraph four gives right to terminate due to any intellectual-property suit at all, even one not related to Jikes or the patents used in Jikes.

5. Termination:

Too broad. Potential for termination due to any frivilous claim exists. There should be a possibility to terminate an individual contribution because of a valid claim without causing all contributions and IBM's initial grant to terminate. IBM should lose right to contributions if it terminates. Is there the possibility of a Contributor losing a significant investment that they have made in Jikes modification in case of termination?

Parser generator: Parser generator used to build Jikes is not Open Source. "

And Dave's report

Jikes News: 11 December 1998 Phone call with Bruce Perens re Jikes License, Jikes Parser Generator

I was a participant in a conference call with Bruce Perens yesterday, along with an IBM manager and attorney. In the words of diplomacy, "It was a frank and open exchange". We discussed Bruce's concerns about the Jikes License and also the question first raised by the Debian group about releasing the source for the Jikes Parser Generator.

At the end of the call, Bruce said he would prepare a report on the call and submit it to slashdot. He graciously offered to send us a preliminary copy for our review. We declined, as we trusted his judgment. We also said we would not write our own report, lest confusion result from two reports trying to relay the same news.

Jikes Mailing Lists

I apologize for the delay in setting up the Jikes mailing lists, and I appreciate the support of slashdot and LinuxToday in posting my notes on their sites, so I could honor my pledge to have all discussions in "full public view".

I ordered a new 6 gig disk for the server machine (100 Mhz Pentium, 32MB memory) a few weeks ago. I had two 1 gig disks. A colleague suggested I should wait for new disk to arrive, as what I had might not suffice to manage the mail lists. The disk arrived yesterday morning. I had a lot of meetings that day, but did find the time to install the disk and did a fresh install of RedHat 5.2.

I've asked for some help in setting up the system. Though I've used Unix for almost two decades, I've hardly ever had the opportunity to log in as root. Indeed, I'm still such a newbie in this area that when I log in as root I still feel a rush -- it's like sitting in a Ferrari and putting the pedal to the metal. Away we go!

Unfortunately, I have proven very adept at doing a great deal of ecological damage to a pristine Linux landscape in a short time. My specialty is reducing /etc/aliases to rubble -- think of the oft-shown TV footage of an old building being demolished by a few pounds of dynamite.

I've asked for help doing things right, and hope it will arrive soon. If not, I'll steam on and promise to be more careful. I will make a best effort to be able to accept subscriptions early next week.

The Jikes Coupon

I drive my daughter Jennifer to school every morning. Ever since the start of the school year, she's been the object of a constant flood of news and concerns about releasing the Jikes source code. She has always been a rapt listener; indeed, I boasted to a friend recently that my daughter was "THE world export in open source licensing issues in the 14-and-under age category".

We both share the same birthday -- December 8. My favorite present was a set of six Jikes Coupons. Here is the text of a Jikes Coupon:

Jikes Coupon Value: 10 Minutes

This coupon entitles David Shields to 10 free minutes of Jennifer's undivided attention to talk about Jikes or whatever he sees fit. During this time, Jennifer may not think or say in any way, "Oh, gosh, here he goes again." Even phrases such as, "We're playing with the big boys" will be tolerated with a pleasant nod and smile.

I realized that I had mistaken a pleasant node and smile for keen interest and concern. However, I have learned a valuable lesson and it forms the basis of my new policy when asked about open source licensing issues.

While I had a role in drafting the Jikes License, now that it is out it has become the responsibility of the IBM attorneys, and only they have the authority to effect changes to it. My making statements about it, especially misdirected efforts to interpret it, can only lead to confusion. So from now on, when asked to speak about these matters my response will be silent and simple -- a pleasant nod and a smile.

I have great confidence in our attorneys. I know they want to do the right thing. I have found them to be quite pleasant, and have even seen them smile from time to time.

Congratulations to Rob Malda

I know that all fellow members of the slashdot community join me in congratulating Rob Malda on completing the work for his undergraduate degree. Sengan informs me Rob is getting a B.S. in Computer Science, and also a B.A. (or perhaps minor) in the Arts. I regret that I do not know the name of his college. I know he is eager to resume hacking.

Newest Member of the Jikes Team: Vadim Zaliva

We posted the source for Jikes at 1PM EST on Monday, December 7th. I received an e-mail the same day 9:13 PM from Vadim Zaliva (lord@crocodile.org) that included a patch file. He also posted the patch in the "Discussion Area" for Jikes Source at the alphaworks site.

Philippe is on vacation, and I didn't get a chance to speak to him after we published the source until late Wednesday afternoon. He asked me if I had seen the patch at alphaworks. I said I had gotten an e-mail but hadn't had time to look at. He said he was "flabbergasted". Though the patch contains only a few lines, it shows a good understanding of much of the compiler structure. I view this as our first success story, and I am sure there are more to come; I view it as a joint tribute to Philippe's design and Vadim's demonstrated skills.

At the end of the call, we had the following exchange:

Philippe: Dave, this guy is good. Think he could come work with us?

Dave: Philippe, he already is working with us -- and for free!

I asked Philippe to report in full on the technical knowledge displayed, but he has some personal business, and I have gone ahead here, as I did not want to delay recognizing Vadim's work. We are pleased to welcome him aboard as the first contributor to join our project since we released the source (there are other contributors I wish to name for work done before we released the source, and I'll try to provide details on our web site early next week).

It's hard to express a "pleasant nod and a smile" over the internet. It's also hard to express a hand shake. My daughter Jen designed a great masthead for the Jikes web site using a masthead design tool built by Chet Murthy and others (Chet is the guy who used to do the libc5 builds -- I told him he had done his last build late last week). Unfortunately, IBM requires a uniform look-and-feel on its web pages, and I am not able to use her work, though I will put up a copy elsewhere on the Jikes web site soon, and am enclosing a copy of it along with this note, and hope that slashdot and LinuxToday can find a way to display it as a sign of welcome -- both to Vadim and to all the future contributors that I expect to meet soon via the Jikes mail lists.

dave

shields@watson.ibm.com http://www.ibm.com/research/jikes

David Landgren writes "Cringley's latest pulpit has been published on pbs.org. He contends that Microsoft will beat the DOJ.

It all hinges around a patent that a small company named Eolas has managed to acquire that deals with remotely executed content. (Not sure if the above site is really them. All they appear to have to show for themselves is a Java applet that emulates an animated GIF. Now that's progress!)"

H: Hehe-progress indeed. But what's important here is that Eolas has come into possession of the US patent for "a distributed hypermedia method for automatically invoking external application providing interaction and display of embedded objects within a hypermedia document." Their product was shown to the big boys-MS, Sun, and NCSA a couple of years before Java or N2.0. Lawsuits, here we come. Maybe. Thanks to Mister Palomar/Charles Lin below for providing this patent link.

Dave Shields of Jikes e-mailed me to report that while Jikes did not win the award for best compiler (who did?), Transvirtual's Kaffe VM won the best VM category, beating Sun and Microsoft. I'm happy to see Tim Wilkinson getting recognition -- I remember him from the fledgling days of Kaffe 0.1... On a side note, only 3200 of you have downloaded Jikes' source code within the first day. What are you waiting for? ;-) The previous record for Jikes in binary form was a whole 500. Anyone else know who won what at the JavaWorld Awards? update Apparently Symantec won best compiler.

Bryce writes "AT&T and IBM announced a series of strategic agreements under which AT&T will acquire IBM's Global Network business for $5 billion in cash. (That's a lot of stuffed suitcases going across the boards tables) IBM will outsource a significant portion of its global networking needs to AT&T. AT&T will outsource certain applications processing and data center management operations to IBM. The transactions could represent $2.5 billion in additional revenue to AT&T in the first full year of operation. The IBM Global Network business AT&T will acquire serves the networking needs of several hundred large global companies, tens of thousands of mid-sized businesses and more than one million individual Internet users in 59 countries. The acquisition boosts AT&T's strategy to rapidly increase the company's revenue, especially at its fast- growing networking services unit, AT&T Solutions. About 5,000 IBM employees will join AT&T as part of a You'll find the AT&T's press release and the IBM version "

IBM released DB2 Beta for Linux today. Benchmarks are available here. A detailed press release states it has JDBC (java database connectivity) support. You'll need to get a password (and read a long license) to download it.

IBM released DB2 Beta for Linux today. Benchmarks are available here. A detailed press release states it has JDBC (java database connectivity) support. You'll need to get a password (and read a long license) to download it.

IBM released DB2 Beta for Linux today. Benchmarks are available here. A detailed press release states it has JDBC (java database connectivity) support. You'll need to get a password (and read a long license) to download it.

Jikes has been released as Open Source today, under the following pretty unrestrictive licence, which has been endorsed by Bruce Perens of Open Source. This is a big step since Jikes is a leading Java compiler and is really fast. It also signals the first Open Source license that IBM has crafted, this being their original code. I hope this will be the beginning of a successful relationship between IBM and the Open Source community. Read below the slashdot exclusive nerd announcement from Dave Shields, one of the Jikes co-authors and the open-source contact for Jikes. Jikes is Now Open Source

On behalf of IBM Research, Philippe Charles and Dave Shields are pleased to announce that the IBM Research Jikes Compiler is now an Open Source Project. You can download the source now.

We will continue to work on the compiler, emphasizing -- as we always have -- strict adherence to the Java Language Specification, and will also continue to seek Sun's guidance on the proper interpretation of the specification where we find the intent to be unclear.

All discussion will be carried out in full public view using mailing lists. You can subscribe here.

We look forward to collaborating with the Java and Open Source communities to make Jikes an even better compiler, and will welcome voluntary contributions early in 1999 -- after we've all had a chance to get acquainted via the mailing list before hacking away, and after the two of us take some vacation time.

We wish to thank the many Slashdot readers who gave of their time to respond to our query "Should IBM Release the Source Code for Jikes?" (see the Comment Summary) , and also thank Sengan Baring-Gould (slashdot), Nelson Minar (MIT) and Bruce Perens (opensource.org) -- they helped make this happen.

End of announcement

Ok here are the pitfalls you may encounter in getting Jikes up and running, so beware: the zipped distribution contains text in DOS-format, so gnu make chokes on it. Make sure you unzip with the -a option. The tar.gz version has the files in *NIX format. Also, some distributions, such as Red Hat 4.2 do not have wchar.h which is needed. I got it to compile by making sure the Red Hat (libc5) entry was the last above OBJECTS in the Makefile and executing touch /usr/include/wchar.h as root. Also you'll need the JDK from blackdown.org to compile anything with jikes.

True story: Dave Shields ate out at a Chinese restaurant Saturday. His fortune: "Very soon, and in pleasant company"! That's us ;-)

Jikes has been released as Open Source today, under the following pretty unrestrictive licence, which has been endorsed by Bruce Perens of Open Source. This is a big step since Jikes is a leading Java compiler and is really fast. It also signals the first Open Source license that IBM has crafted, this being their original code. I hope this will be the beginning of a successful relationship between IBM and the Open Source community. Read below the slashdot exclusive nerd announcement from Dave Shields, one of the Jikes co-authors and the open-source contact for Jikes. Jikes is Now Open Source

On behalf of IBM Research, Philippe Charles and Dave Shields are pleased to announce that the IBM Research Jikes Compiler is now an Open Source Project. You can download the source now.

We will continue to work on the compiler, emphasizing -- as we always have -- strict adherence to the Java Language Specification, and will also continue to seek Sun's guidance on the proper interpretation of the specification where we find the intent to be unclear.

All discussion will be carried out in full public view using mailing lists. You can subscribe here.

We look forward to collaborating with the Java and Open Source communities to make Jikes an even better compiler, and will welcome voluntary contributions early in 1999 -- after we've all had a chance to get acquainted via the mailing list before hacking away, and after the two of us take some vacation time.

We wish to thank the many Slashdot readers who gave of their time to respond to our query "Should IBM Release the Source Code for Jikes?" (see the Comment Summary) , and also thank Sengan Baring-Gould (slashdot), Nelson Minar (MIT) and Bruce Perens (opensource.org) -- they helped make this happen.

End of announcement

Ok here are the pitfalls you may encounter in getting Jikes up and running, so beware: the zipped distribution contains text in DOS-format, so gnu make chokes on it. Make sure you unzip with the -a option. The tar.gz version has the files in *NIX format. Also, some distributions, such as Red Hat 4.2 do not have wchar.h which is needed. I got it to compile by making sure the Red Hat (libc5) entry was the last above OBJECTS in the Makefile and executing touch /usr/include/wchar.h as root. Also you'll need the JDK from blackdown.org to compile anything with jikes.

True story: Dave Shields ate out at a Chinese restaurant Saturday. His fortune: "Very soon, and in pleasant company"! That's us ;-)

Jikes has been released as Open Source today, under the following pretty unrestrictive licence, which has been endorsed by Bruce Perens of Open Source. This is a big step since Jikes is a leading Java compiler and is really fast. It also signals the first Open Source license that IBM has crafted, this being their original code. I hope this will be the beginning of a successful relationship between IBM and the Open Source community. Read below the slashdot exclusive nerd announcement from Dave Shields, one of the Jikes co-authors and the open-source contact for Jikes. Jikes is Now Open Source

On behalf of IBM Research, Philippe Charles and Dave Shields are pleased to announce that the IBM Research Jikes Compiler is now an Open Source Project. You can download the source now.

We will continue to work on the compiler, emphasizing -- as we always have -- strict adherence to the Java Language Specification, and will also continue to seek Sun's guidance on the proper interpretation of the specification where we find the intent to be unclear.

All discussion will be carried out in full public view using mailing lists. You can subscribe here.

We look forward to collaborating with the Java and Open Source communities to make Jikes an even better compiler, and will welcome voluntary contributions early in 1999 -- after we've all had a chance to get acquainted via the mailing list before hacking away, and after the two of us take some vacation time.

We wish to thank the many Slashdot readers who gave of their time to respond to our query "Should IBM Release the Source Code for Jikes?" (see the Comment Summary) , and also thank Sengan Baring-Gould (slashdot), Nelson Minar (MIT) and Bruce Perens (opensource.org) -- they helped make this happen.

End of announcement

Ok here are the pitfalls you may encounter in getting Jikes up and running, so beware: the zipped distribution contains text in DOS-format, so gnu make chokes on it. Make sure you unzip with the -a option. The tar.gz version has the files in *NIX format. Also, some distributions, such as Red Hat 4.2 do not have wchar.h which is needed. I got it to compile by making sure the Red Hat (libc5) entry was the last above OBJECTS in the Makefile and executing touch /usr/include/wchar.h as root. Also you'll need the JDK from blackdown.org to compile anything with jikes.

True story: Dave Shields ate out at a Chinese restaurant Saturday. His fortune: "Very soon, and in pleasant company"! That's us ;-)

Jikes has been released as Open Source today, under the following pretty unrestrictive licence, which has been endorsed by Bruce Perens of Open Source. This is a big step since Jikes is a leading Java compiler and is really fast. It also signals the first Open Source license that IBM has crafted, this being their original code. I hope this will be the beginning of a successful relationship between IBM and the Open Source community. Read below the slashdot exclusive nerd announcement from Dave Shields, one of the Jikes co-authors and the open-source contact for Jikes. Jikes is Now Open Source

On behalf of IBM Research, Philippe Charles and Dave Shields are pleased to announce that the IBM Research Jikes Compiler is now an Open Source Project. You can download the source now.

We will continue to work on the compiler, emphasizing -- as we always have -- strict adherence to the Java Language Specification, and will also continue to seek Sun's guidance on the proper interpretation of the specification where we find the intent to be unclear.

All discussion will be carried out in full public view using mailing lists. You can subscribe here.

We look forward to collaborating with the Java and Open Source communities to make Jikes an even better compiler, and will welcome voluntary contributions early in 1999 -- after we've all had a chance to get acquainted via the mailing list before hacking away, and after the two of us take some vacation time.

We wish to thank the many Slashdot readers who gave of their time to respond to our query "Should IBM Release the Source Code for Jikes?" (see the Comment Summary) , and also thank Sengan Baring-Gould (slashdot), Nelson Minar (MIT) and Bruce Perens (opensource.org) -- they helped make this happen.

End of announcement

Ok here are the pitfalls you may encounter in getting Jikes up and running, so beware: the zipped distribution contains text in DOS-format, so gnu make chokes on it. Make sure you unzip with the -a option. The tar.gz version has the files in *NIX format. Also, some distributions, such as Red Hat 4.2 do not have wchar.h which is needed. I got it to compile by making sure the Red Hat (libc5) entry was the last above OBJECTS in the Makefile and executing touch /usr/include/wchar.h as root. Also you'll need the JDK from blackdown.org to compile anything with jikes.

True story: Dave Shields ate out at a Chinese restaurant Saturday. His fortune: "Very soon, and in pleasant company"! That's us ;-)

Jikes has been released as Open Source today, under the following pretty unrestrictive licence, which has been endorsed by Bruce Perens of Open Source. This is a big step since Jikes is a leading Java compiler and is really fast. It also signals the first Open Source license that IBM has crafted, this being their original code. I hope this will be the beginning of a successful relationship between IBM and the Open Source community. Read below the slashdot exclusive nerd announcement from Dave Shields, one of the Jikes co-authors and the open-source contact for Jikes. Jikes is Now Open Source

On behalf of IBM Research, Philippe Charles and Dave Shields are pleased to announce that the IBM Research Jikes Compiler is now an Open Source Project. You can download the source now.

We will continue to work on the compiler, emphasizing -- as we always have -- strict adherence to the Java Language Specification, and will also continue to seek Sun's guidance on the proper interpretation of the specification where we find the intent to be unclear.

All discussion will be carried out in full public view using mailing lists. You can subscribe here.

We look forward to collaborating with the Java and Open Source communities to make Jikes an even better compiler, and will welcome voluntary contributions early in 1999 -- after we've all had a chance to get acquainted via the mailing list before hacking away, and after the two of us take some vacation time.

We wish to thank the many Slashdot readers who gave of their time to respond to our query "Should IBM Release the Source Code for Jikes?" (see the Comment Summary) , and also thank Sengan Baring-Gould (slashdot), Nelson Minar (MIT) and Bruce Perens (opensource.org) -- they helped make this happen.

End of announcement

Ok here are the pitfalls you may encounter in getting Jikes up and running, so beware: the zipped distribution contains text in DOS-format, so gnu make chokes on it. Make sure you unzip with the -a option. The tar.gz version has the files in *NIX format. Also, some distributions, such as Red Hat 4.2 do not have wchar.h which is needed. I got it to compile by making sure the Red Hat (libc5) entry was the last above OBJECTS in the Makefile and executing touch /usr/include/wchar.h as root. Also you'll need the JDK from blackdown.org to compile anything with jikes.

True story: Dave Shields ate out at a Chinese restaurant Saturday. His fortune: "Very soon, and in pleasant company"! That's us ;-)

Jikes has been released as Open Source today, under the following pretty unrestrictive licence, which has been endorsed by Bruce Perens of Open Source. This is a big step since Jikes is a leading Java compiler and is really fast. It also signals the first Open Source license that IBM has crafted, this being their original code. I hope this will be the beginning of a successful relationship between IBM and the Open Source community. Read below the slashdot exclusive nerd announcement from Dave Shields, one of the Jikes co-authors and the open-source contact for Jikes. Jikes is Now Open Source

On behalf of IBM Research, Philippe Charles and Dave Shields are pleased to announce that the IBM Research Jikes Compiler is now an Open Source Project. You can download the source now.

We will continue to work on the compiler, emphasizing -- as we always have -- strict adherence to the Java Language Specification, and will also continue to seek Sun's guidance on the proper interpretation of the specification where we find the intent to be unclear.

All discussion will be carried out in full public view using mailing lists. You can subscribe here.

We look forward to collaborating with the Java and Open Source communities to make Jikes an even better compiler, and will welcome voluntary contributions early in 1999 -- after we've all had a chance to get acquainted via the mailing list before hacking away, and after the two of us take some vacation time.

We wish to thank the many Slashdot readers who gave of their time to respond to our query "Should IBM Release the Source Code for Jikes?" (see the Comment Summary) , and also thank Sengan Baring-Gould (slashdot), Nelson Minar (MIT) and Bruce Perens (opensource.org) -- they helped make this happen.

End of announcement

Ok here are the pitfalls you may encounter in getting Jikes up and running, so beware: the zipped distribution contains text in DOS-format, so gnu make chokes on it. Make sure you unzip with the -a option. The tar.gz version has the files in *NIX format. Also, some distributions, such as Red Hat 4.2 do not have wchar.h which is needed. I got it to compile by making sure the Red Hat (libc5) entry was the last above OBJECTS in the Makefile and executing touch /usr/include/wchar.h as root. Also you'll need the JDK from blackdown.org to compile anything with jikes.

True story: Dave Shields ate out at a Chinese restaurant Saturday. His fortune: "Very soon, and in pleasant company"! That's us ;-)

Jikes has been released as Open Source today, under the following pretty unrestrictive licence, which has been endorsed by Bruce Perens of Open Source. This is a big step since Jikes is a leading Java compiler and is really fast. It also signals the first Open Source license that IBM has crafted, this being their original code. I hope this will be the beginning of a successful relationship between IBM and the Open Source community. Read below the slashdot exclusive nerd announcement from Dave Shields, one of the Jikes co-authors and the open-source contact for Jikes. Jikes is Now Open Source

On behalf of IBM Research, Philippe Charles and Dave Shields are pleased to announce that the IBM Research Jikes Compiler is now an Open Source Project. You can download the source now.

We will continue to work on the compiler, emphasizing -- as we always have -- strict adherence to the Java Language Specification, and will also continue to seek Sun's guidance on the proper interpretation of the specification where we find the intent to be unclear.

All discussion will be carried out in full public view using mailing lists. You can subscribe here.

We look forward to collaborating with the Java and Open Source communities to make Jikes an even better compiler, and will welcome voluntary contributions early in 1999 -- after we've all had a chance to get acquainted via the mailing list before hacking away, and after the two of us take some vacation time.

We wish to thank the many Slashdot readers who gave of their time to respond to our query "Should IBM Release the Source Code for Jikes?" (see the Comment Summary) , and also thank Sengan Baring-Gould (slashdot), Nelson Minar (MIT) and Bruce Perens (opensource.org) -- they helped make this happen.

End of announcement

Ok here are the pitfalls you may encounter in getting Jikes up and running, so beware: the zipped distribution contains text in DOS-format, so gnu make chokes on it. Make sure you unzip with the -a option. The tar.gz version has the files in *NIX format. Also, some distributions, such as Red Hat 4.2 do not have wchar.h which is needed. I got it to compile by making sure the Red Hat (libc5) entry was the last above OBJECTS in the Makefile and executing touch /usr/include/wchar.h as root. Also you'll need the JDK from blackdown.org to compile anything with jikes.

True story: Dave Shields ate out at a Chinese restaurant Saturday. His fortune: "Very soon, and in pleasant company"! That's us ;-)

Deepak Saxena was the first to write in with this week's Cringley Pulpit. A little startup company called Eolas has received patent 5,838,906 on November 17th... a patent that covers use of embedded program objects (applets) within Web documents, the use of any algorithm that implements dynamic, bi-directional communications between Web browsers and external applications, and even the whole concept of executable content, which is at the very foundation of Java and ActiveX. Cringely argues that since companies must provide their share-holders with maximal value, and Microsoft has the deepest pockets of any company, Microsoft could offer to pay a high price for an exclusive license from Eolas, and let Eolas earn big bucks by suing everyone else for abuse of their patent. Clearly a coalition of players could bid against Microsoft, but perhaps a call for prior art (pre-1993) is needed: when, for instance, was Corba invented? Thanks to Acheron, here is the patent's URL on IBM's patent server.

An Anonymous reader wrote in to send us a link to a press release from about entitled IBM Brings Enterprise and Web File Sharing to Linux Big Blue is definitely noticing 'Lil Tux.

Darin McBride writes "I guess Microsoft made a few, um, misleading statements (purely accidental, I'm sure) which IBM felt it had to respond to. I'm sure MS wasn't throwing around FUD on purpose. Really." Darin's comment is, um, slightly misleading, in that Oracle too is subject for chastisement. But, I'm sure that too was purely accidental, Darin, wasn't it. ;-) &lt- J O K E.

IBM will release DB2 for Linux Beta on December 7th. However it will still lack database extenders and data replication. It may or may not include Java stored procedures and Java user-defined functions (time to clamor ;-)). The article also says IBM will announce on December 1st that it is enabling its enterprise file systems sofware for Linux. Anyone know what that might mean? Another filesystem? IBM does appear to understand the role that Linux could play on attacking the desktop. Remains to be seen about HP and Sun. Update! tpepper wrote in to say he believes the big Dec. 1 announcement will be that IBM's ADSM client is becoming available for Linux. An unsupported version has just become available and ADSM is described on this page "

IBM will release DB2 for Linux Beta on December 7th. However it will still lack database extenders and data replication. It may or may not include Java stored procedures and Java user-defined functions (time to clamor ;-)). The article also says IBM will announce on December 1st that it is enabling its enterprise file systems sofware for Linux. Anyone know what that might mean? Another filesystem? IBM does appear to understand the role that Linux could play on attacking the desktop. Remains to be seen about HP and Sun. Update! tpepper wrote in to say he believes the big Dec. 1 announcement will be that IBM's ADSM client is becoming available for Linux. An unsupported version has just become available and ADSM is described on this page "

heBgB writes "Transmeta Corp, the super-secret technology startup funded by Paul Allen (and now employs Linus Trovald and David "crack.com" Taylor) has been awarded a patent called Memory Controller for a Microprocessor for Detecting a Failure of Speculation on the Physical Nature of a Component being Addressed. It has all kinds of cool buzzwords like "code morphing software", "speculative memory" and the like. Anyone want to speculate? "

Booker writes "So IBM announces a 25 gig hard drive... does the world need this yet? Unless this is in a RAID, would you really want to trust 25 gigs on a single drive? What would you use this for? 400+ hours of MP3s comes to mind... "

frokost writes "There is an editorial at freshmeat written by Jim Gettys, one of the original authors of X. Very interesting, indeed." S: Jim's idea of cross-toolkit themes should be extended to Wine: many companies will use Wine to port to Linux, simply because there are a lot of Win32 capable programmers out there. Wine will therefore be one of the important GUI toolkits out there. I also agree with his point that WIMP is step 1. Voice recognition is step 2. Right now, Linux GUI standards are in very rapid development, which makes it the right time for a voice recognition standard to be built and added so that apps may be designed/reworked early to include voice-recognition. Some work similar to what he's talking about has been done by IBM, such as a browser to help blind users surf the web.

frokost writes "There is an editorial at freshmeat written by Jim Gettys, one of the original authors of X. Very interesting, indeed." S: Jim's idea of cross-toolkit themes should be extended to Wine: many companies will use Wine to port to Linux, simply because there are a lot of Win32 capable programmers out there. Wine will therefore be one of the important GUI toolkits out there. I also agree with his point that WIMP is step 1. Voice recognition is step 2. Right now, Linux GUI standards are in very rapid development, which makes it the right time for a voice recognition standard to be built and added so that apps may be designed/reworked early to include voice-recognition. Some work similar to what he's talking about has been done by IBM, such as a browser to help blind users surf the web.

Several folks sent this in, but the first one was anonymous. Seems that IBM is working on a New Supercomputer that they are selling to the dept. of energy. 3.9 trillion ops per second. Has anyone ported an RC5 Client to this thing yet? Hello, Dept of Energy? We'd just like a few days please...

The ever yellow News.com is running a *nix feature right now, covering everything about SCO's reported losses and it's new alliance with IBM, as well as Solaris' updates.

Vidar Hokstad writes "Apparently, IBM will team up with SCO and Sequent to create a new Unix for IBMs entry-level to large enterprise servers. I expect that means mostly hardware that runs Aix or AS/400 today, but why don't they just port Linux or *BSD instead? This article at news.com has more details" S: IBM's website has further details on this Project Monterey, in which they spell out that the partnership is to deliver only one variant of Unix running on PowerPC, IA32 and IA64 platforms. Can anyone make any sense of this? A cynical first analysis would be that IBM has realised that there is still money to be made in Unix in particular by using its position of a single large vendor to reduce support-FUD; IBM would use SCO to gain market share very quickly while SCO benefits from a shield from Linux' penetration into the "enterprise market". I guess I just don't get what technical reason there could be to yet another variant of Unix. Do you?

We received the following email today from IBM. I'd like to thank David Shields and all the others at IBM that helped resolve this issue so quickly. Rob,

I met Tuesday with the attorneys who sent you the letter about Slashdot's use of the IBM logo. A letter from IBM granting Slashdot permission to use the IBM logo on the web site in connection with IBM related news stories will go out today. I gave the attorneys a couple of WHO CD's to enclose with the letter.

One of the attorneys noted you weren't using a precise representation of the IBM logo. We agreed not to go down that road. You get to decide how to present the IBM logo to your readers.

We released Jikes for Linux on July 15th. A few days later someone from alphaWorks told me they had received over 10,000 hits in one day from Slashdot. I soon found the reason -- Sengan's article IBM Releases Java Compiler for Linux. I'm an avid fan of your site, and have had several discussions with Sengan about Linux and Open Source issues.

Last Thursday I saw the article IBM Beefs up Apache Package in which you mentioned you had gotten a letter from IBM about Slashdot's use of the IBM logo. I expected this would not sit well with your readers, and sent off a note to a number of IBMers interested in Linux to alert them to this problem.

I got sufficient feedback within a few hours that I was able to send you the note Thursday evening saying you had nothing to worry about.

It's taken a few days to sort this out (there was some delay locating the attorney who sent you the letter). There was a flood of e-mail inside IBM -- turns out many IBMers visit your site regularly.

Keep up the good work,

dave

denali sent us Berst's latest column. He is doing a cool round-up of some of the new technologies that will be coming out. Spotlighting the round-up is IBM's holographic storage-for those days when the 18 gigger won't cut it. Some of the other inventions coming soon are better searching algorithims, light etched chips and super-small PDAs'. Read more about them over this way.

Jaime Cruz writes "OS/2 Netlabs has completed porting everyone's favorite graphics manipulation program to OS/2! As far as I know, this is the first port of Gimp to a non-Unix based operating system. For the full details, check here! " Also, Craig Setera wrote in to tell us that he has released binaries of his win32 port of the Gimp. This one still needs an X-Server and stuff, but its a good start.

Edmund Ronald writes "IBM is demoing a Pilotized Thinkpad 560. But their so-called technology demos are usually vigorously marketed within a short timeframe, so expect to see a lot of these on the streets soon ! "

Jason Coposky writes " This is a link to a new storage device from IBM. This will origionally be targeted at digital cameras, but will probably filter into other markets, such as laptops etc. "

ockman@penguincomputing.com writes "It looks like IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Compaq have decided to get back in the game of adding real value. They have a PCI spec. [Ed's note - will have] that's six times faster than the current one. This was created without the support of Intel, as what these companies call "a grass-roots type of backlash" Sounds like good news - either Intel supports the superior technology and competes with Mylex and the gang, or loses market share. Besides, it looks as if Intel will support it anyway. More MHz never hurt anybody (no pun intended).

James sent us a link to a Salon article about RMS. It's a quite humorous piece. Pretty good all around, right down to the picture. Worth a read.

Allen Rouse asks " What books are there that deal exclusively with the issues of writing servers? For example, Richard Stevens' books deal with the tools needed to write any kind of UNIX software, servers are just one among many. He mentions general TYPES of servers but not much about the specific issues encountered in writing complex servers (like say NetTrek or an ORB)."

Jeremy Arnold has written an essay on what he calls LUTE- the Linux Usability Testing and Evaluation project. It could help make programs more usable by organizing volunteers to test software and clean things up. Far to often great programmers aren't the best at creating the ideal user interface. Perhaps this project could put people who understand the human factors in touch with the guys who write the killer code. Hit the link below to read it and throw in your 2 bits. The following was written by Slashdot reader Jeremy Arnold The LUTE Project Linux Usability Testing and Evaluation Last week on Slashdot an article was posted about an essay on user interface design. As a comment to that article I brought forth an idea for a group of people who would do usability testing for Open Source Linux projects. The response to the idea was generally positive, so I have now prepared this more formal proposal. If I can find a place to host web pages and a mailing list and Slashdot readers agree there is a need for this group and some are willing to volunteer their time to be part of it, the Lute project should be running shortly.

What is the Lute project? LUTE stands for "Linux Usability Testing and Evaluation". A bit redundant, but I like acronyms that form words. :) Usability testing is the process of testing the user interface for a piece of software to make sure that it makes sense to the user. "Makes sense" refers to the interface being intuitive and consistent, and generally that the user interface helps the user rather than frustrating them. Note that there is a difference between "usability testing" and just plain "testing". Lute does not exist to find bugs in software. The purpose is to find flaws in the user interface.

Most commercial software development includes a usability testing phase, and the most usable software generally includes usability testing throughout the development cycle. Large software development companies usually have a "usability testing lab" with lots of (somewhat) fancy equipment to aid them in this testing. This, of course, translates to money, which most open source projects do not have. Usability testing can be performed (though somewhat less effectively) with no special equipment, but it is an area which many open source developers are unfamiliar with, and most do not take the time to do it.

As Linux becomes more accepted in the commercial world and starts to be used by more "common users" rather than the traditional hacker types, software usability will become more and more important.

The Lute project is an attempt to address these issues by performing usability testing for open source projects. This testing will be performed for free by Lute volunteers. On the web, Lute will also serve as an information center for good user interface design as well as techniques for usability testing and evaluation.

Lute will not force developers to use certain toolkits (such as KDE/Qt or Gnome/GTK). In fact, when testing a program, Lute volunteers won't even be looking at the source code. In addition, Lute will not enforce strict standards (like forcing you to use 5 pixels between buttons and 10 point bold Helvetica font for menu text). Upon completing testing, the Lute volunteer wil l give an evaluation back to the developer about what aspects of the interface work well, and, more importantly, what aspects don't work well. The evaluator will also try to give the developer ideas on how to improve these aspects. It is up to the developer to choose whether or not to implement these changes, and how to do it.

How will Lute work? These details are subject to change, but this is how I envision Lute working. The developer will submit a request for an evaluation of his/her project. (Of course, most open source projects have multiple developers. In this case, one developer would act as the liaison to Lute.) This request will include a short description of the program, a list of features to be tested (sometimes this will be the whole program, other times just a few features may need to be tested), and a developer contact (email address).

Once a request has been submitted, it will probably be appended to a web page list of pending projects and sent out on a Lute mailing list. Lute evaluators can then choose to accept the project. The evaluator will write up a list of tasks to use for the test. These tasks are the things that the user will perform in order to give the evaluator a good feel for what works well and what doesn't. After preparing this task list, the evaluator will discuss it with the developer to make sure that the developer thinks it adequately covers the expected uses of the program. The evaluator would then find about 3 "average users" to test the program with, and report back to the developer with the findings.

Note that the definition of an "average user" could be a bit different for each project. For example, the average user of a programming IDE would be a programmer, while the average user of a web browser might be the evaluator's mother. Also note that the average users will generally be somebody the evaluator knows, and they must be able to meet in person to perform the evaluation. (If you disagree with this condition, go read some articles/books on usability testing and then post an informed comment here.)

This "formal testing" process could take a bit of time, and is probably overkill at times, especially when usability testing is performed regularly throughout the development cycle. In this case, a full formal test should certainly be performed from time to time, but at other times the developer might just need an "expert opinion" about how the usability of an application could be improved. For this, the developer might put in a request for an "expert opinion" (or perhaps this should be "somewhat informed opinion"), at which time a Lute evaluator could volunteer for the project and then look at the program and make recommendations based on their prior experience with and knowledge of user interface design and testing. Note that this is a supplement to the formal testing, and not a replacement. The formal testing can be much more effective; it just takes a bit more time and effort to do.

What roles are involved? Here is a description of the various roles which need to be fulfilled for this to work:

• Project Maintainer

  I am currently this person. I will be in charge of setting up the infrastructure for the project, including things like web pages and mailing lists. I will also be in charge of facilitating communication between Lute volunteers, and make the final decisions in policy matters. Most open source projects have some type of "benevolent dictator". Lute's "Project Maintainer" is the same type of thing.

  In case somebody cares, I am Jeremy Arnold (jeremy_a@bigfoot.com). Last spring I graduated from Utah State University with a bachelor's degree in Computer Science, and I now work as a Java Performance tester for IBM. I have little formal experience with user interface design, and my usability testing experience consists of about a week doing usability testing on a program I developed during a summer internship. I certainly don't claim to be an expert in this area, but it is something I find very interesting and in many ways it comes naturally to me. I have been a Linux user for about 4 years now, although I have never really (previously) taken a very active part in the Linux development community.

• Evaluator

  These are the people who will do most of the real work for Lute. They will then volunteer to evaluate the programs submitted by the developers, and report their findings back to the developer.

  While I don't expect the evaluators to have years of experience in usability testing, they will be required to have at least some knowledge in the area. At a minimum, this will probably mean they have to read some on-line information about it, and perhaps for their first project or two a more experienced evaluator will also evaluate the program and then give some feedback to the new evaluator about any areas they might be able to improve in. This is not meant to scare off people who would like to help; I just feel it is necessary in order to provide quality feedback to developers and not lose credibility for Lute. Anybody who has done some work with user interface design and knows the challenges involved could probably pick up the necessary knowledge to be an evaluator pretty quickly.

• Developer

  Developers are, of course, the people who are developing open source projects. More specifically, they are the ones developing open source projects with user interfaces. This does not necessarily mean graphical user interfaces, although most programs evaluated by Lute probably will have GUIs. Any program that interacts with the user has some kind of user interface, and can be evaluated by Lute.

  Lute will only evaluate programs at the request of a developer. The programs to be evaluated must be open source (as a matter of principle....I am not against closed source development for some projects, but Lute is really designed to help open source developers) and freely available (if the developers are charging users for their product, then they can afford to pay somebody for usability testing). I refuse to get into a debate about whether or not KDE is really free, but programs written using KDE/Qt fit the definition of free used in this paragraph, and are eligible for Lute evaluation.

  Lute will encourage (and perhaps require) the developer to read some general information on user interface design before we will evaluate their program. This is simply because it is a waste of time for us to evaluate a program that has no consideration for well-known design principles and then report on all the ways their program violates these principles. Any required reading will be as short as possible.

  Programs to be evaluated must have a reasonably functional interface. It is best to evaluate the user interface of a program before it is completed, so that the framework can be fixed before a lot of code is developed over it. However, even if the program is not complete, the user interface must be functional. If your program has a button labeled "Find a cure for cancer and generate world peace" (not necessarily a good name for a button), it doesn't have to actually find a cure for cancer and generate world peace, but if I press that button it should pop up a window that says that the cancer-curing peace-generating functionality is not implemented, rather than just sitting there or crashing the program or something.

• Average User

  The evaluator will test the program by observing average people use the program (performing the list of tasks given by the observer). These users are very important, as they can show the evaluator the types of difficulties that most people will have when using the program.

  Average users are not direct volunteers to Lute as the evaluators are. This is because evaluators need to be able to watch the users as they run the program, which means they must be geographically near the person. Because of this, evaluators will generally find average users among the people around them. Luckily, average computer users are pretty abundant in the world, so this shouldn't be a problem.

  Besides the need for geographical proximity, volunteers to be average users would not be desirable. If a person is an "average user" for 50 usability tests, they are no longer average. That person should consider becoming an evaluator.

• Web page/mailing list host

  As mentioned far above, the Lute project is also in need of somebody to host the needed web pages and mailing list(s). If the project becomes popular, I could afford to get a permanent connection to the Internet and use my machine as the host, but I would rather not spend that money until the project gets moving and looks like it is going to succeed. CGI (or perhaps Java servlets?) access on the web host would be really helpful, as I hope to get much of the process of submitting requests for evaluation and stuff automated. Even if the project does become quite popular, I wouldn't expect the mailing list to be extremely high volume or the web pages to need high bandwidth (except of course if the URL was posted on Slashdot).

Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Post them here, and I will try to answer them. A lot of the details remain to be decided, most likely once there is a team of Lute evaluators. Note that all of the policy and procedure stuff in this article is not set in stone. It is just my thoughts on how things would work best. Like I said, I don't claim to be an expert, and it is quite possible (and even likely) that things could be done better.

"I want to help. What do I do?" I'm glad you would like to help. If you would like to be a Lute volunteer as an evaluator, web/mailing list host, send me email (jeremy_a@bigfoot.com) and let me know. Personal replies are unlikely for evaluators, but I will let you know once the mailing list is set up.

Kevin Forge has written in with an interesting piece called Lawyers use WordPerfect. It talks about his view on free software vs. commercial software, and especially commercial software on free Operating Systems. Check it out. The following is a feature written by Slashdot reader Kevin Forge Lawyers use Word Perfect Each time even a rumor of a commercial app being ported to Linux is mentioned we get comments that run the gamut from ; "Let's all go buy this to show our support for the platform" to "We can achieve most everything that prog offers by using these open source tools so why should we trust our important work to this propriatery bloatware ?".

"who wants world domination"?

We constantly hear the argument that Linux will achieve world domination or that a significant percentage of all computers will be run on Linux in a few years. However to achieve either goal Linux must be a viable option for people with real business needs now.

This brings me to the lawyers we all love to hate. I am siting in a Lawyer's office waiting to be paid for fixing Windows 95 on 2 PCs ( again ) when a client walks out having just spelled out the details of her divorce ( loud enough for me to hear ). Before she is in the parking lot the laser starts spiting out the 1st page of a 30 page court document for her case.

How the hell could that be done so fast ?

Simple It was already done. The details that change are few and far between. Things like names, addresses and dates. Once these are entered into fields a macro is run that generates your own customized "I can't live with this bum anymore" court filling.

Don't discount inertia

Now you could say it's easy enough to do this kind of thing with a shell script on a Linux system without the added expense of Word Perfect. However it took these people years to tune operations and learn WP to the point where this became a practical time saving prosedure. To move this operation to existing open source software would mean learning all these tricks again.

How important is the cost of changing ? Well these same lawyers buy new PCs preburdend with MSOffice 97 and promptly upgrade to Corel Perfect Office 8 or even 7 in order that they can keep using the same techniques. Sure those features are available on MSOffice and the learning curve from one Windows app to another is tiny compared to moving to traditional Unix tools. However an even lower cost is simply shelling out a hundred bucks for a CD from Corel.

Where does Linux fit?

Well with WP on Linux the barriers to entry become significantly lower for Lawyers. Simply put, a Penguin preloaded and configured with XDM, KDE, WP8 and Laserjet support has the same learning curve as moving up to a Dell with NT4 or 98 and WP8. With the massive reliability gap taken into consideration they could see Linux as a cost effective solution and another group joins ISPs and tech companies as Linux users.

Where does this leave the open source word processors ?

I see no reason to not continue aggressive development of the better GPLed Word Processors. K/LyX is moving well and there is talk of a serious contender from the Gnome camp. Maxwell, which shines among Linux apps has been GPLed with a flat request to "port it to Gnome and KDE" ( It's Motif based ). One of these will eventually become a challenger to WP across the board. By then Word Perfect will be accustomed to maintaining a quality lead that enables them to survive against a free challenger. In other words those without money or who attend "The church of Emacs" will have good WPs and the rest of us will have slightly better WPs.

Telling people to "accept the open source concept" if they want to use Linux or to "GPL all code that you will release on Linux" is completely pointless. Even RMS knows this which is why he wrote the LGPL.

This applies to the SQL people too.

Right now all but 2 of the large database makers are officially supporting their products on Linux. IBM programmers say a port is running in the lab ( I have no reason to doubt this for even a second ) and Microsoft would prefer to pretend Linux doesn't exist (let's return the favor :). Some months ago I argued that Oracle wouldn't ever port to Linux until they saw it as a "port or die" desision at which point they would start selling the DB for Linux they already have running in the labs. The reality is a little more impressive than the speculation. It seems all these vendors will be giving away products in order to establish market share. Is it just me or do other people think they are trying to get a significant piece of the Linux DB pie before it gets big?

Should we all just run out and buy these programs to show our support?

No. That's just crazy. Let the free market have it's say. There are evaluation versions of the better stuff floating around. If you find it's good enough to keep beyond the evaluation period then fork over the dough. That doesn't mean you need to wait out the full period however, just until you know it's a keeper. We should buy them if they are of some use to us. We should buy them if they are good. It's your money spend it wisely, you now have choices.

To read news about Amoeba (a newly freed OS), Sun's new free software website, IBM's new UNSUPPORTED ADSM client, Staroffice 5.0, and a possible port of QuickMotion to Linux, hit the link below. Jesper Juhl informs us that the Amoeba Distributed Operating System is now available for free download with a pretty liberal license. Amoeba is a powerful microkernel-based system that turns a collection of workstations or single-board computers into a transparent distributed system. It has been in use in academia, industry, and government forabout 5 years. It runs on the SPARC (Sun4c and Sun4m), the 386/486, 68030, and Sun 3/50 and Sun 3/60.

Robert Herrmann writes "Sun is getting serious about helping people use free software on Solaris."

On the commercial side, an anonymous reader informed us that IBM released an UNSUPPORTED Linux port of the ADSM Version 3 client., so please don't discourage them by bugging them for support.

Telcontar writes "StarOffice 5.0 for Linux will be available by August 18. The English website has not been updated yet (will be updated today), but the German website says that more than 400,000 users are already registered for the latest version (4.0 with service pack 3). The final version will be released on September 30 and will have all features of the versions for other platforms. It is free for private/educationaluse. 5.0 will be available in 8 languages (soon to be 24), and StarDivision has just opened an office in the USA"

Finally, David Nedrow writes that Practice Corp makes QuickMotion/2 for OS/2: a Quicktime viewer which provides standalone viewing, plugin support and QuickTimeVR and is better in many cases than XAnim. Tom Harding at Practice has indicated that they have been looking at Linux as a target platform. So if you'd like to see a port send a pleasantly worded message to the developers.

(I've edited the comments for brevity)