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IBM Launches Public Domain Project "Eclipse"
ccf writes "NY Times is carrying an article about how IBM is launching a new developer organization (Free Reg blah blah blah) called Eclipse, for open source development. The article is not rich in details; it says the stuff will be in the "public domain" but makes no mention of specific licenses." If anyone can find some links that make more sense about what this actually is, please post them.
here!
Listening for the sound of the coming rain...
That sounds like IBM trying to be "cool". They heard all the kids are doing this open source thing , let join it.
Cruise TT
Its awesome to see IBM commiting to Open Source software, I have been using a PC since 81 and I can remeber a time well, before the invasion of the clones, that seeing IBM back an Open Source project was a pipe dream. IBM still has more clout than anyone out there in the business market, kinda like the old addage, "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM", lets hope it becomes, "Nobody ever got fired for using IBM open source"
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
How is this different than SourceForge?
Don't get me wrong, I think the more the 800 pound Big Blue gorillia throws its weight the right way is a good thing, but it seems to me to be duplicating effort of SourceForge.
This is a boring sig
www.eclipse.org
Listening for the sound of the coming rain...
For more information on the Eclipse project look at www.eclipse.org
The move, to be sure, is an attempt to play to I.B.M.'s strength and away from its weakness. Microsoft's Windows and Sun's Solaris version of Unix are the leading proprietary operating systems.
Better later then never, I guess. Where was this 8-9 years ago?
Fuck Ajit Pai
Are the big companies, in using Linux here and there in order to gain developer-share in the community, hurting Linux and OS or helping them, in your opinion?
.. can these types of OS minded projects as started by commercial giants end up hurting the OS community more than helping it?
...
I mean, in a scenario like this, which looks like it will benifit the OS community, when/if things happen to sour (or Eclipse simply doesn't end up doing what IBM was envisioning)
Just curious
"Old man yells at systemd"
No mention of any license? well, gee!
Doesn't anyone actually remember what the public domain is anymore? It's that place you release stuff that you want anyone to be able to do anything whether whether you like their ideas or not! It's the place where things go after copyrights expire so that everyone can enjoy them.
public domain is something that not enough people hold dear or even know about and is quickly disappearing because of that
Actually, I doubt that IBM is trying to be "cool". They definitely don't need it. What they want to obtain is 0-cost software, not in the sense that it costs you $0 to buy, but that it costs them (near) $0 to develop. IBM produces hardware, and hardware sells much better if software is running on it. Software changes daily and is pirated, hardware doesn't.... It's a much safer market.
For the "service" part: IBM sells solutions, which means people at your office solving problems. Again $0 (developement) costs makes this more effective and profitable.
Here http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/05/technology/05OPE N.html?todaysheadlines
Eclipse contains the tools used to build the Visual Age for Java IDE. These are mainly Java based tools, and include the really cool SWT/JFace graphics library for Java, which be used instead of AWT and Swing. Imagine building UIs for Java which don't suck -- SWT is fast and look like native GUI apps, and don't have the stink of AWT about them.
Some I.B.M. Software Tools to Be Put in Public Domain
By STEVE LOHR
I.B.M. plans to announce today that it is placing $40 million of its software tools in the public domain as the first step toward founding an open-source organization for developers.
The move is the latest step in International Business Machines' embrace of the open-source software model, in which programmers around the world share software code for joint development and debugging. In the last few years, I.B.M. has made big bets on the two major open-source projects, the Apache Web server and the GNU Linux operating system.
The new open-source organization, called Eclipse, will focus on the programming tools used to build applications and other software. More than 150 software companies, from Linux distributors like Red Hat and SuSE to applications developers like Rational and Bow Street, are lined up to join the Eclipse community.
The group plans to establish a governing board later this month, to guide the technical standards and work of the open-source software tools community. I.B.M. will be one of several board members of the Eclipse organization.
"Somebody had to start it, but this is absolutely not an I.B.M.-controlled thing," said Scott Hebner, an I.B.M. software marketing executive.
Traditionally, the standards for software development tools have been supplied by the companies with leading operating systems including Microsoft's Windows, Sun Microsystems' Solaris or I.B.M.'s mainframe operating systems.
Yet Eclipse, analysts say, is a break from the proprietary pattern, and it is coming at a crucial juncture for the industry. The Internet is evolving beyond a medium for viewing Web pages and downloading information and entertainment. Instead, the Internet is in effect becoming the equivalent of an operating system -- a technology "platform," on which programs can be run and built.
New software technologies like Java, the Internet programming language, and XML, a standard for identifying and interpreting information sent over the Internet, are making the evolution possible. And the transition opens the door to a new level of Internet use, from automating online transactions between companies to developing an array of personalized services for individuals.
The potential new uses, made possible by software, are being called Web services. The industry sees Web services as an important new avenue of growth. Major companies including I.B.M., Microsoft and others are eager to develop the new business, and they are all trying to woo developers to their respective camps.
"I.B.M. understands that whoever has the most developers, wins," said James Governor, an analyst at Illuminata, a research firm. "With Eclipse, I.B.M. is making a very aggressive move. It is betting that opening up the software tools ecosystem will work to its advantage."
The move, to be sure, is an attempt to play to I.B.M.'s strength and away from its weakness. Microsoft's Windows and Sun's Solaris version of Unix are the leading proprietary operating systems. I.B.M. has backed Linux, whose code is distributed free, partly because Linux's ascent would work to the detriment of both Microsoft and Sun.
I.B.M. considers it a worthwhile investment to place in the public domain software tools that it spent $40 million to develop, seeing the move as one that further undermines the leading operating system suppliers. I.B.M. wants to take value away from the operating system layer of software and make money mainly by selling specialized software applications to companies and charging for services -- helping companies to integrate various kinds of information technology to make businesses more productive.
"This clearly plays to I.B.M.'s strengths and where our customers want to go," said Steven A. Mills, an I.B.M. senior vice president in charge of the software group. "Customers do not want to be locked into one platform for their information technology infrastructure, and developers do not want to be locked into a single state of mind for development."
The name Eclipse was chosen to suggest that the open-source approach will eclipse the proprietary development model.
The software that I.B.M. is putting into Eclipse and into the public domain include programming tools for debugging, user interface work, editing and project management. The tools employ Java and XML technology, and the intent of Eclipse is to provide a choice of mix-and-match tools.
The Eclipse Project got a lot of buzz at the last OOPSLA conference. A follow-on to IBM's VAJ, it's intended to be a programmer's workbench and include current tools like a refactoring browser, continuous integration. Too bad it seems slashdotted.
License ? Public Domain means no license =)
Think article over at NewForge sheds some light on this. According to them, they feel they can make a fair share of money from Linux. While we are all congratulating IBM on their Open Source move, what might be happening is: They are selling Linux and getting free development work from the Open Source community. It's a creative way to cut back expenses.. just Open Source your work, and get it developed for free.
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Eclipse is an IDE framework written in Java. It is very extensible; all support for editors, compilers, debuggers, and other tools, etc is provided as plugins.
Although it's written in Java, it can be used to develop programs written in other languages; there are already proof-of-concept plugins for C (using gcc) and make.
It is being developed by OTI, an IBM subsidiary who did Visual Age Smalltalk and Visual Age Java. These people have a lot of experience building IDEs.
Currently you can download the basic framework and a set of plugins that let you edit, compile and debug Java applications --- a pretty decent Java IDE. (The very-context-sensitive code-completion is pretty nice. It also has a great feature where it compiles the code every time you save and puts unobtrusive error icons at every line with an error --- an excellent way to keep your source error-free as you go, without getting in your face.) You get the source but currently not under a true open source license. The OTI people promise that they will be moving to a true open source license soon.
This is a big initiative within IBM. The WebSphere Workbench product is already based on Eclipse. Lots of people within IBM, including IBM Research, and several other companies are building new development tools as Eclipse plugins.
One slightly weird thing about Eclipse is that it doesn't use Swing. Instead it has its own toolkit called SWT, which is designed to expose a single cross-platform API but is reimplemented using native widgets on each platform. You can download versions for Win32 and Motif but in the newsgroups some OTI people said that they're working on a Gtk port.
More information at http://www.eclipse.org.
I had a chance to talk to an IBM evanglist personally at a conference. He was a fellow speaker. And we talked about the IBM OSS and Eclipse thing. From what I gathered it is going to be very interesting. Specially it is an OSS development platform where anyone can plug in their development tool. I remember that it was written in Java, but not specifically geared towards Java. In other words I could develop C++ code in Eclipse.
And from what I gathered IBM is TRYING REALLY hard to become more OSS aware. The interesting thing is that while yes it is partly marketing it is also very much desire to see OSS work. Cool to see that IBM is hip again...
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
"Public domain" precludes licensing. If it's truly in the public domain, no license can be enforced.
"Public Domain" means it is not protected by copyright, and therefore there would be NO license whatsoever.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
PD is a license in the same way that zero is a number. When you put somthing in the public domain you are saying "Here it is. Do whatever you want with it." By putting somthing in the public domain, you are relinquishing any and all claim to copyright on it that you may have. Someone else can come along, modify it, and sell it without crediting you. There is no restriction whatsoever on what you can do with a piece of PD code. On the other hand, Open Source licenses like the BSD or GPL licenses allow you to share your code with the but still retain some control over it: BSD basically says that any derivitive code must credit the original author(s), while GPL says that any derivitive code must also be GPL.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
All that is public domain here is the IDE framework. IBM seems to still have every intention of making money on sets of plugins to the environment, such as the case of the Websphere Workbench and Websphere Studio Application Developer 4 (WSAD) (and of course the associated sales of Websphere App Server!)
I've been using WSAD4 for a while, and it's a great development environment for J2EE programming. The team has made great strides in usability over the course of the alpha and beta builds.
I'm sure the community will be able to come up with some really interersting ways to slice and dice source code of various languages given that the messy IDE code it out of the way!
(Disclaimer: I work for IBM's Research division. What I write here is only my own opinions, not IBM's).
I think IBM found an interesting way to make money from OSS here.
Eclipse is fully open source (it's really cool, BTW. I'm using it for the past two weeks, and while v1.0 still has some rough edges, it is the best Java IDE I've ever used).
Eclipse itself is just a very flexible framework. It ships with a few plugins, also OSS, which make it a Java IDE; but it can also be used (using proper plugins) to develop just about anything else.
IBM will use this framework to develop just about EVERY tool for developers that it has. This include WebSphere Studio, DB2 development tools, MQ Series development tools, the works. However, while the platform itself is open source (and can be used by anyone), the more advanced tools (such as the various eBusiness tools) will not be free.
Naturally, others can also develop their own plugins for Eclipse (and some already do).
- Tal Cohen
What is really interesting is the code name.
What is it, exactly that IBM is trying to eclipse?
I've read a few posts on how this isn't a good thing since IBM is going to make a profit off it. I think that if they do indeed make a profit off it that it is a very good thing! How many times have we unfortunatly seen a great OSS project fail or have to cut back on development because the company was going under?
In a nutshell, if this works we'll have another Open Source Buisness Model which we've all been itching for for a while now.
IANAL, but I believe PD means it isn't under a license.
IANAL, but I believe Public Domain means any unscrupulous person or company can come along and put said software package under their own license, charge money for the software, and more importantly, steal away all rights of the original authors.
It's much better to GPL your software, or at least put it under a BSD like license, to protect your own rights, and the rights of those who use your software.
Once software has been open-source licensed, it's out there and won't go away, unless it has no merit or appeal to anyone. So it would be difficult for companies like IBM to "hurt" open source by open sourcing more of their software.
Besides, IBM's open source efforts are unlikely to "sour", even if IBM changes direction in future. IBM is going into this with its eyes open, and the people behind this movement aren't naive. The money they're spending on open source can be likened to a marketing budget - the $40 million which Eclipse allegedly cost to develop isn't even enough for a national TV advertising campaign. But it goes beyond marketing - it's strategic, and attracts developers away from their competitors, some of whom don't have a good response to open source (Microsoft) and some of whom are already playing in this space (Sun, with Forte/Netbeans).
So while the big guys duke it out in a "race to the bottom" in terms of the cost and openness of certain kinds of software, we the audience should sit back and enjoy the results. It's competition, and we all benefit from it.
The article got it wrong. According to posts on the newsgroup Eclipse will available under an Open Source License. As many have pointed out, being public domain precludes the possibility of such a license. Once again, it will be a copyrighted piece of software available under an open source license, just like most free software.
Yes, Java is useable, yes it is improving. But the client apps are butt-ugly, still too slow, and the setup is still kludgey for most.
IBM is probably figuring out that despite millions of dollars in marketing, and a semi-united front promoting the technology, Java is just a dog.
Visual Age for Java is one of the best IDE's I've ever worked with (and I've worked with a lot of them). However, in order to acheive some of its power, it sticks all source code into its "repository." The repository is a database with a proprietary format that indexes and cross references all your source.
That would be fine, except that it doesn't play well with tools that expect source to be in text files. You can do it, but you have to export the source and then re-import it once you're done using the tool. Everything from source control to profilers to lints to pretty printers had to go through this dance.
Does anybody know if the Eclipse framework uses the same repository?
A man without a God is like a fish without a bicycle.
Java client tools are dead and buried - no one wants to use them where a native alternative exists...and more often than not these days, users have multiple choices in native tools.
IBM: OUR 800 pound gorilla.
Remember IBM used to be evil the way Micro$oft is today? How did they pull their heads out?
NetBeans is an OS project that does the same sorts of things as eclipse. It is written in Java and allows extensions to the IDE through a plugin mechanism.
Information at http://www.netbeans.org
NetBeans is the basis for Sun's Forte for Java.
Information at http://www.sun.com/forte/
Read Epic the first RPG novel.
Huh? VAJ is a total dog, and has been a failure in the marketplace.
In my experience, the primary difference between NetBeans and Eclipse can be summed up in three letters: SWT.
The Eclipse team concluded, based on the common experience of many Java programmers, that AWT/Swing based UIs suck rocks. They look like crap, they don't fit the platform, and they're slow as molasses.
So they threw them away. Replaced 'em with a new, custom written, tiny, lightweight, lightning fast widget system called SWT based on platform native widgets. The result is that SWT UIs are fast, and look great.
As far as features go, NetBeans and Eclipse are quite similar. I prefer the Eclipse UI (I hate the way that NetBeans handles subwindows...), but that's really just a matter of taste. But as far as performance goes... I've been using a version of Eclipse for about two weeks now, and I still can't believe it's written in Java. I've been writing UIs in Java for the last 3 years, and I've gotten so used to the snail-crawl of Swing... Eclipse is a real eye opener.
I found some interesting eclipse links via google:
http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/eclipse4ca d_id=8561#277820 054,00.html
http://www.new-age.nl/eclipse/main.php?res=Links
http://www.theserverside.com/home/thread.jsp?thre
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,243
Bryan "BJ" Hoffpauir
This is actually a very good idea. From reading the text of the article that someone posted here it seems Eclipse is an organization, not a product. The purpose of it seems to be for them to make development software and have people move over to using their free software for development instead of letting companies like Microsoft and Sun try to lock developers into their platform.
This really is a great idea. If there is just an open organization who made developer software their only incentive would be to make the best possible development tools, not to keep out new technologies like Microsoft did with Java.
The fact that IBM has started this and has their muscle behind it is a very good thing. A lot of people should see this as a viable alternative when they hear IBM is behind it.
Of course I could be way off but that seemed to be what the article was trying to say.
FiGZ.COM - A waste of perfectly good web space
Just some weeks ago we had some people from an IBM partner over the floor at my company talking about visual age for java and websphere.
They also mentioned this Eclipse explaining what it was, they didnt say much and i was pretty bored after the long talk about visual age for java and the really good looking debugger it had, but never the less they gave me the this site http://www.eclipse-workbench.com/ which should explain more about Eclipse and the Workbench around it, its some new way to include all IBM develop tools in one workbench and intregrate them all or something and its used for java and stuff and thats all i remember but maybe the site is usefull anyways..
Quazion
I've been using Eclipse for a couple of months now, as my principal Java development environment. Until then, I'd been a text-editor-and-Ant guy (with Jed, a lightweight Emacs clone, as my text editor). Eclipse is the first Java IDE that makes me more productive, as far as I can tell. VAJ might have done, but the repository made it a pain to use.
So, the repository: nope, it's gone in Eclipse. Eclipse *does* maintain a local history, however, and can use CVS very easily. I believe future versions (the R2.0 stream has been promised as "soon" for a short while - I don't expect it'll be long before it's available) will have a source repository plug-in interface (a lot of Eclipse is based on a plug-in mentality) which should make it feasible to integrate it with other tools.
The best feature of the Java editors (for me) is the refactoring. Rename a class, method, parameters, package, whatever, and Eclipse will tell you what it's going to do to all affected source modules, and then do it. Likewise you can extract a block of code as a separate method, or ask Eclipse to give you empty implementations for all the unimplemented abstract methods in a class. Again, the refactoring interface should be available at some stage, and so hopefully there'll be a large list of refactorings available.
Likewise, it has excellent searching facilities - just click on a method and ask for all the places it's declared/referenced, for instance. All very handy stuff.
The support on the Eclipse newsgroup is excellent, and I'm not going to pretend that some of my support of it as a product isn't due to the fact that my first question was answered in a timely manner by none other than Erich Gamma. There are very bright people behind Eclipse. (OTI, basically.) There are also bright people working on plug-ins - Instantiations is working on ways to make it look more like VAJ for those who like VAJ, for instance.
Now, I've only used a small part of Eclipse - the Java development environment. The idea is that it's not just for Java - Eclipse is an IDE *framework* which just happens to come with a Java editor almost as an example. As a Java developer, that may be all that I need, but I like the idea that someone may come up with excellent XML editors etc to plug into it as well. (I believe WSAD already has an XML editor, but an open source one would of course be a Good Thing.)
One vaguely negative thing to note: although Eclipse is fast when it's up and running, it *is* a memory hog. Coming back after lunch and poking at it makes it obvious that an awful lot has been swappped out.
On balance, I love it. Finally, an IDE which actually *helps* me...
Since eclipse.org seems slashdotted, you can get a copy of the technical overview from google's cache, but it's just the text from the pdf (no pretty pictures).
The orginal whitepaper is here
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
From a link from the news release on IBM's web site:
developerWorks hosts a variety of open source projects, all under open source licenses approved by the Open Source Initiative. Many are licensed under the Common Public License or the IBM Public License.
In other words, the Times goofed. And just as the concept of Free code was starting to make sense to the rest of the world...
I sincerily hope that when organizations such as IBM and Sun join OSS, they realize that the kind of market (the developer's market) swing that this movement does create moves in a direction fundamentally away from their software technology ideas.
Looking at all the Java that IBM has been pushing arround, just makes me sick. I hope that ugly thing just go away and desapear in the horizon.
Now, this is funny since the name Eclipse does suggest "covering up the Sun(R)" and I hope it does not only cover it up but, like the aztecs thought, that Java gets swallowed into oblivion by the cool bitter moon (that actually looks like a C sometimes).
Same goes for C++ and all those other amazingly stupid ideas that corps have pushed into our throats.
Alex
NO SIG
How about making OS/390 and VM/ESA open source? Then I'll believe you're fully committed to the concept.
(We'll never see it).
.... Microsoft .NET platform??
.NET is, but doesn't this sound a bit similar??? (it is an OSS development platform where anyone can plug in their development tool. I remember that it was written in Java, but not specifically geared towards Java. In other words I could develop C++ code in Eclipse.) or is it a known fact that it is aimed at killing .NET or am i completely wrong?
really i don't actually know what
Don't quote me on this.
this project has been around for a while, I've actually downloaded and compared (briefly) with some other SWING IDE. As an everyday SWING user (JBuilder, netbeans, TogetherJ), Eclipes is FAST! SWING just can't beat the speed!
And Sun has created SWING, and this IDE GUI package is way faster than SWING and I can see SWING die. Hence it Eclipes the Sun. That's the real meaning.
Don't mind if its another netbeans really, I use netbeans, as well as Forte, and maximum respect to those OSS people!
humps
WebSphere Studio Workbench, the IBM supported offering for use by IBM Business Partners, is based on the Eclipse Project."
Ok, so the commercial product is based on this Eclipse thing....
"The Eclipse community, currently hosted by IBM, focuses on extending the base extensible tool platform technology and creating new technologies that complement this common platform for tool integration."
Wow is that one big mouthful of bs, but I think it means "develop stuff for us please"
"Once these technology extensions become stable, they will be available for tool builders and included in new releases of the WebSphere Studio Workbench."
And wham! It goes back into their commercial product once we stablize it for them?
Don't other companies call this a beta test ?
It would be, but they also want us to develop the fixes for them as far as I can see...
Wax on, wax off baby!
I'm not sure how valid this is but does IBM want us to develop new ideas for them or is their motivation the same as the open sourcers?
IMO, if you want to build a good UI in Java, you don't have to use IBM's stuff. Instead, use JBuilder by Borland, the personal version is free! And yes, it does run on different OSes.
So IBM has decided to take a page from Sun and release its inferior IDE opensource and get otehr people to help them develop it. It still won't change how BAD their IDE is. I've not yet tried WSS but Visual Age (which it's taken from) is a smalltalk IDE ported to work with java and it probably was really great when it was written. Now adays its just annoying and lacks real version control system support and forces you to use a shared (meaning as in SMB windows share) repository that is simply no way to manage source. No real merge capability, no locking (if you're into locking instead of merging) no idea who's got it....its a mess. I don't see how this is news and all the great things that have happened with NetBeans isn't. Slashdot seems to have a very pro-IBM slant these days. (watch that Karma roll back to zero, but its TRUE). NB 3.3 is in beta 2 and is VM independant. Not only that it doesn't try to force you into Sun's tools in some sort of vertical scheme unlike everything IBM has release for java to date.
-Andy
The problem with file based compilation units is that it is too granular and doesn't adequately represent program elements. The way a program should be represented (IMHO) is as a tree (graph) where the class has inst vars and methods as children, the methods have temps and statements, etc.
If programs were represented this way, tools that did diffs and 3-way merges could be soo much better. Imagine a diff tool that could recognize that a method had changed, rather than moved to different lines in a file.
The VAJ repository stores information like this and can do a semi-intelligent compare of differences.
Sean
What I like... It gives the open source community the good IDE that I think they've been missing. Yes, I know there are some out there, but frankly this is the first one that I've seen that comes close to Visual C++ or Visual BASIC. Adapt this to GCC/GPP, Perl, Apache, CVS, MySQL, etc. and it will get dramatically easier for people to move their development to BSD or Linux. The more people that use it, the more it will become a standard.
What I don't like... It's still a bit clumsy. Moving between windows with the keyboard just doesn't work the way I expect. The editor does some strange things. (Control-backspace does nothing. You can indent a select block with tab, but can't unindent with control or shift-tab.) I also don't like the focus on Java. It makes it too easy for idiots to dismiss it as another Java tool. Eclipse can easily be an IDE for C++ or other languages and it runs a lot of native code under the covers.
Hey, we have a new distribution of Linux, it is called "GNU Linux Operating System". I just wonder the author of the article has talked to RMS or not, or have any idea of what Linux is (well, it's kinda hype, and it is cool to say "I just setup Media Player for my Linux box. The app is so cool"
"Trying is the first step towards failure" - Homer J Simpson.
I've been using Eclipse for a couple of weeks now and it is the most impressive IDE I've used on any platform, for any language. What's especially exciting (beyond the pending open source release) is that it is designed, from the ground up, to support plugins. In fact, the comparison I make is not to JBuilder or VisualAge, but to Emacs. Small, central kernel; lots of hooks for plugging in new features, major functionality is itself plugins ... the whole works.
Eclipse is the IDE I've been waiting for, but I can see it eventually taking the form of "the developer's desktop" with plugins completely unrelated to Java, or even code, development.
The whole visual age line of software is technically solid, but the interface (like everything IBM's ever put their name on) is crap.
One of the primary reasons for creating Eclipse was that it can be an IDE for Java. Why is that important? Because most of the Java development is done on Windows (using JBuilder or whatever), even if it's deployed to Sun/Linux. Eclipse takes Windows out of the equation altogether to get a complete Java dev/deploy on Linux. It kind of defeats Java's anti-Windows mantra if all the Java programmers are going clicky-clicky on a Windows GUI.
How's this informative? This link is in the very short article.
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
I'm suprised that there's no mention yet
of the linux version. It's available for
download, too.
For the more salient example of looking the gift horse in the mouth, you need go no further than Microsoft.
Right now where I work we're seeing streaming media going over Windows Media Player, because it's free for both client and server. To Microsoft's credit, they don't jack the price up the minute the competitor dies in any given arena. In fact, they generally don't jack the price up at all. They merely use the new market lock as a tool to grab another market.
So right now, Windows Media Player is 'free', both client and server, at least until Real and QT both die out.
I always extended the old adage, "There's no such thing as a free lunch." At work when they offer us a 'free lunch' I figure we've either already paid for it, or will be called to in the near future. In either case, the work will be done whether or not the lunch is eaten. So I go and enjoy.
But with either the 'free lunch' or the 'gift horse', there's ALWAYS a price. Sometimes it isn't apparent, sometimes you can't avoid paying it anyway. But you should always try to know what the price is.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Have you actually tried it? Don't discount a product you haven't tried or even looked at based on experiences with other completely unrelated products.
I've never been too good at deciphering bureaucratificated junk, but how is this any different from SourceForge ?
If IBM really wants to help out, they should support the existing systems instead of reinventing the wheel. Lots of great ideas have come from the dotcom boom, they were simply mis-managed or not economically viable from an investor's standpoint. Why aren't these things being pushed, not swallowed, by the corporate giants ? If they want grassroots support, they should think of supporting the grass-rooters and the things we do/like/believe in.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I think whoever wrote the New York Times artical should have prefaced it with IANAL. I would be very surprised if in fact it is actually public domain - as open source and public domain are in some ways opposite but the "journalist" probably did not know this and thought they were the same thing. Or thought (probably correctly) that the reading public is too stupid to understand things like "open source" and calling open source public domain is close enough.
Or perhaps it is IBM being a dumb ass and is really releasing software in the public domain, but I doubt it.
IBM's alphaWorks now has a C/C++ plugin for Eclipse. I haven't used it, but it sounds cool ... a pure Java C/C++ parser (used to maintain indexes and such), and the ability to call out to a native compiler.
I've been using Eclipse for a couple of weeks now, and the more I use it, the more I like about it. You can be effective in it quickly, but as you learn more about it, you can continue to customize it to fit your needs. Cool as cool gets.
I feel sorry for other IDE developers, they are about to get blown off the map.
...one would want to have richer graphics and a new interface to Emacs.
Something like giving Emacs new interfaces was done in the eighties or early nineties, I think by Borland. Essentially it was Emacs emulating not only vi but also Word, WordPerfect and other DOS word processors.
I think I saw such a project some months ago. Can't remember where. With LISP being supposedly so superior to Java and anything else, structured or OO, Emacs victory should be a given if enough people get interested and coordinated.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
Here you are
/Nau
If you're just looking for a java IDE that continually parses your code (thus allowing for all sorts of refactorings, quick navigation, etc.), check out Intellij IDEA:
http://www.intellij.com/
Download the free pandora version; it supports more refactorings.
Maybe trying the same thing MS did to Netscape with IE. Give away a development environment rather than let the opposition own the development environment. The open nature of it all will hopefully make it far more adaptable and adoptable than the VisualStudio.NET black-hole.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
As many have suggested, IBM has many reasons for making such a move, but overall they're a sleasy outfit that essentially taught MS the tricks they mastered and subsequently kicked their teacher's ass with.
Allow me to elaborate on where I get off calling IBM sleasy. I develop on-line testing for the education community. As many know, Macromedia's products own this market and have been standardized by the Educational Testing Service (ETS, the national academic testing standards organization of the US) . Among the entities who are aware of this fact years ago was Big Blue and their Lotus software division.
Around 1998 Lotus made a deal with Macromedia to purchase the management interface for the Macromedia education development line. Remember, there are standards in education and ETS sets many of those standards as far as tests are concerned, for example, the infamous scantron that we are all unfortunately familiar. The Macromedia choice is a national standard set by ETS, not a choice to be made by individual instructors. IBM's Lotus division, seeing this delicious situation, puchased the management interface known as Pathware and promptly added a zero to the price and a service contract. After all, it's the schools who are paying for it. And they should pay dearly, right?
I mean fuck the people hard right? Steal money from children and all that good shit that MS studied from them. That's IBM's strategy --is it not?. If any managers from IBM/Lotus would care to add to this, I'm sure the whole open source community is very interested to hear about their vast generosity and good will.
First, SWT is cross-platform. It's based on a very small native core, which is apparently quite easy to port to new platforms.
Second, porting the system to AWT, aside from the sheer complexity of the task, would entirely defeat the purpose of why the wrote SWT to begin with.
AWT/Swing is slow. There is no way around that. The way that it's implemented, it will inevitably be extremely slow compared to native UIs. For large, complex UIs, you really need to use Swing; at the same time, the larger and more complex the UI, the worse Swing's performance gets.
The Eclipse team, after doing a lot of work writing IDEs in Java, concluded that no matter how much effort you spend on tuning, and no matter how good a JIT you have running in your JVM, the performance will not be acceptable.
Eclipse performance is wonderful. I've been using it regularly for about two weeks, and I still keep getting this shock every time I remember that the thing is written in Java. You'll never get that in an AWT port - you'll just get the same slow, ugly stuff that people normally associate with Java.
I think I left out the ':)'...
I agree with everything you say except the part about the dll being easy to port. I'll beleive it when I see a kde port. Even then, it won't work across the internet, because the native part can't be d/loaded. Perhaps if the native part was built into the JVM it really would become the Java UI alternative.
I agree with your claim that open development can lead to higher total product costs than closed development; however, low development cost was never the right reason for doing open development in the first place. One good reason for choosing the open source approach is the desire to respect the users' freedom, as well as the developers'. Another good reason for developing software openly is that truly open development can lead to much higher quality products:
I think that some of the things you mention to in your caveat regarding open development are actually Good Things; the difficulties to which you allude may have less to do with the well-documented "features" of open source and more to do with the abilities of the managers charged with addressing them. Let me annotate part of your post in order to clarify that statement.
[My apologies to Dennis Leary, etc.]
... unless you are a good manager who understands that it is the manager's responsibility to ensure that the goals of the project are achieved and who is therefore willing to play the tyrant with dramatic flair when it becomes necessary. Two words: Richard fskcing Stallman.
... unless you are a good manager who understands that delegation is inevitable for large-scale system building and who knows how to identify, motivate, assist, and trust talented contributors. Two words: Linus fscking Torvalds.
... which is not a problem (it may even be a Good Thing) if you are a good manager who understands that the shape of things must change to suit the needs of the people who use them, and who consequently designs the infrastructure of both the software system and the user/developer community in such a way as to make such a distributed effort possible and rewarding. Two words: Larry fscking Wall.
I have long suspected that one reason (of many) why project managers in traditional shops fear open source development is that the model puts a lot of responsibility on them and requires that they perform their function well. In fact, it may well be that a poorly managed open source project is less likely to survive infancy than a poorly managed closed source project -- and it may well be that some managers know they aren't up to the challenge.
Wow. I did not think IBM management could be that, um, confused; thanks for setting me straight.
Some brief remarks that I would have sent you privately if I had known how:
Best of luck with your project!
From what I can see, IBM is already making out big from Linux investments. Largely because of Linux, the mainframe has gone from dinosaur to cool, and that shows up in the bottom line.
Linux is largely about meritocracy, and even in its bad old days IBM had products with merit. Now that the company appears to have refocused after the near-death of the early 1990's that merit appears to be improving and emerging again.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
what happens if your windowing toolkit doesn't support all the widgets? So you don't have motif (shudder) or win95 pr gtk (hopefully) -- one nice thing about awt is you can use an applet on crusty old systems. Of course, applets should have access to at least a good part of the HTML DOM anyway.