IBM to Open Projects at SourceForge.net

cfelde writes "On Friday, IBM said it is contributing some 30 open-source projects to SourceForge.net. IBM also said it is expanding its own developerWorks Web site with more resources including training in PHP and other popular technologies." This probably dovetails with IBM's new full on support of the PHP language.

Comments

Why am I worried....

[DoraLives]

that this will all turn out horribly wrong in the end? Am I just alergic to large corporations in general?

Is my tinfoil hat on too tight?

Re:Why am I worried....

[javaxman]

that this will all turn out horribly wrong in the end? Am I just alergic to large corporations in general? Is my tinfoil hat on too tight?

It's really hard to fault you, actually. History is hard to forget, and it's not unreasonable to wonder if a company can really change it's culture and philosophy so radically.

On the other hand, if someone is giving you a bunch of cool stuff ( i.e. source code ), and doing so under terms ( i.e. license ) that are acceptable to you... it's generally a good thing. I'm not seeing the downside, at least for OSS developers. The downside could be there, of course... but I can't easily think of what it could be.

The upside for IBM, on the other hand, is pretty obvious... it's not like they've done this entirely without thinking of their own benefit. Maybe thinking of it that way will make you feel better? It's not so much that IBM has radically changed ( though it has ), it's that they've figured out how to leverage open source development ?

Amazing

[Rei]

It's amazing how well IBM has been transforming itself from the universally-recognized Bad Guy(tm) to a geek's best friend ;) Back in the day, IBM was the Evil Empire of the computer world.

Re:Amazing

[Lisandro]

IBM is just protecting their interests. They beleive (like most people here) that most software will become a comodity in the near future, and instead of fighting it they roll along. I happen to beleive it's wise, but's quite a bold move.

Anyway, yes, it is weird. Not to long ago IBM was as hatred as Microsoft is now...

Re:Amazing

[someguy456]

It's amazing how well IBM has been transforming itself from the universally-recognized Bad Guy(tm) to a geek's best friend ;) Back in the day, IBM was the Evil Empire of the computer world.

If IBM was able to turn around from the "Bad Guy(tm)" to a geek's best friend, I think there is a possibility that many years from now, today's Evil Empire, Microsoft, might become a geek's best friend while, oh, let's say Google became the new "Bad Guy(tm)

May God help us all...

Re:Amazing

[stevesliva]

No, IBM thinks CPU time will be the commodity and services will the the cash cow. Stable, reliable open software will be the grease, the public good.

Re:Amazing

[sconeu]

IBM, while dominating and monopolistic in its day, did have a reputation for quality and topnotch research.

Yes, there is MS Research but it's in no way comparable to IBM Research.

And don't even mention MS and "quality" in the same breath unless the words "lack of" are placed between them.

IBM's rhype also now open source

[Xpilot]

On a somewhat related note, IBM has released rhype, it's research hypervisor as open source under the GPL. This should spice up the free hypervisor community. First Xen, now IBM's rhype. Choice is so good :)

Wait...

[Anonymous Coward]

do we like IBM this week?

IBM And MONEY

[Indes]

They have it, why not create a sourceforge like site for their own projects instead of using the good will of other open source companies?

or do they plan to donate some money to it to help it all as a whole??

IBM is in an odd situation no doubt, but using OpenSource public tools when properly funded seems somewhat.. rude, no?

Re:IBM And MONEY

[Stradenko]

I'm happy to let IBM put its shit in our community wheelbarrow. More shit for everyone can only be good.

Good news for PHP...

[bc90021]

...and I'm glad it was included in this story, since I hadn't seen the prior one.

While a lot of people like to knock PHP (mostly Java guys, but hey ;) ), I love it. It's easy, functional, and lately, a lot more mature with the OO aspects. (I have one class now that I use for database access, and it makes life so much easier.)

With things like PHP-GTK, you can even use it to write applications, and with IBM behind it, things will likely only improve.

Re:Good news for PHP...

[harborpirate]

Languages are a tool - and each tool has its own use. You shouldn't use a screwdriver to pound a nail, as it were. Because even though you might get it to work, you're putting more effort into it than you really need to.

To me, PHP is great for small, agile projects - ones that need to be designed and written quickly, and require a lot of changes to the code to happen throughout implementation.

I think OO PHP isn't all bad - being able to compartmentalize your code for reuse and complexity reduction is great.

My concern, however, is that people will start to look at PHP as an enterprise level language, which in my opinion, it isn't. Every PHP project that I've worked on started to break down after a certain level of complexity. I think part of this was due to the lack of Object Orientation, but I think part of it was also the nature of the language itself. I'll be interested to see what IBM can do with PHP, but lets just say I don't envy their guys if they're trying to switch their enterprise level development to use it.

Re:Good news for PHP...

[teknomage1]

I' pretty sure people knock it because it's easy. Some people feel intimidated by things being made easier for the masses because they're afraid of being obsolete. A rather prominent greek philosopher came out against paper because he felt it'd be the downfall of society. Young people wouldn't bother to memorize things anymore and so and so forth. Many people attack PHP as a language that let's bad programmers make websites, so clearly they're talking about the downfall of programming civilization. Now php does have some syntax issues, but hopefully those'll get worked out before too long. I still think it makes a great first language for people to discover programming with.

List of the Projects?

[D4rk Fx]

Does anyone have a list of all thr projects IBM is helping? TFA didn't seem to have all of them, only a couple

Re:List of the Projects?

[UTF-8]

I don't know all of them, but one of the projects that was moved was http://icu.sourceforge.net/

IBM has been very involved with open source for many years, and now they are moving the hosting of many projects to other sites. One of them is to sourceforge. The donation was more of a move from DeveloperWorks to Sourceforge because of the increasing costs (bureaucracy) to maintain many projects on ibm.com.

ICU (International Components for Unicode) has been on DeveloperWorks and AlphaWorks as open source since 1999.

The Why

[ackthpt]

IBM Software is turning up the noise on its open-source contributions.

What it's about:

An interesting bit on the transition and recovery of IBM was on the BBC a couple days back, refreshing and adding a layer of information to my memory of experience with the behemoth IT company. IBM's core business is selling service, not hardware (they sold the PC unit to Lenovo) and big iron doesn't sell much anymore, so they've come to the point of making some hardware, but throwing their weight behind systems and services. Why so much given to Open Source? IBM is more than just friendly to Linux and Open Source, but see them as their life blood. They won't make money pushing systems built around Microsoft Windows, because that leaves too much leverage in an external (and sometimes unfriendly) camp. Not to overlook the taint associated over the past few years with gaping security holes in Microsoft products, which could reflect very negatively on IBM having to go in and clean up the mess. A couple years ago IBM had already broken the 1G$ barrier on Linux systems, in one quarter. I haven't looked at their company statements lately, but it's clear this is their planned direction of growth.

Large Corporations and Criticism

[sameerdesai]

It's amazing how we criticise M$ for not being open and IBM for tring to be open.

You can't have it both ways.

[winkydink]

People gripe when big, evil corporations develop proprietary code and then when these corporations open it up, they gripe that there must be a hidden agenda.

I think some folks just like to gripe.

Opening this code will dovetail nicely with IBM becoming more of a services-focused company. When BigCo wants a project implemented & maintained using open source, IBM will be there to lend a hand (for a price of course).

This is a good move,

[robyannetta]

As we learned in The Art of War by Sun Tzu, to win the war, make as many allies as possible.

IBM learned early on that if you have the Linux community backing a multi-billion dollar corporate entity like themselves, they stand a helluva good chance toppling that Redmond, Washington company they don't like.

They have my vote.

Then again...

[Ulric]

Microsoft Contributes To Open Source Site

List of projects

[shutdown -p now]

AIX Toolbox - http://sf.net/projects/aixtoolbox/

Bluetooth ad-hoc network simulator - http://sf.net/projects/bluehoc/

Dynamic Probe Class Library - http://sf.net/projects/dpcl/

Journaled File System - http://sf.net/projects/jfs/

IBM Jikes Compiler for the Java Language - http://sf.net/projects/jikes/

Jikes RVM - http://sf.net/projects/jikesrvm/

Java POS Config Loader - http://sf.net/projects/jposloader/

Toolbox for Java/JTOpen - http://sf.net/projects/jt400/

openCryptoki - http://sf.net/projects/opencryptoki/

LTC Linux Kernel Performance Project - http://sf.net/projects/linuxperf/

LSID (Life Science Identifier) - http://sf.net/projects/lsid/

Memory Expansion Technology - http://sf.net/projects/mxt/

OpenSSH on AIX - http://sf.net/projects/openssh-aix/

Standards Based Linux Instrumentation - http://sf.net/projects/sblim/

UDDI4J Java Class Library - http://sf.net/projects/uddi4j/

Web Services Description Language for Java -
http://sf.net/projects/wsdl4j/

ACP Modem (Mwave) Driver for Linux - http://sf.net/projects/acpmodem/

International Components for Unicode - http://sf.net/projects/icu/

Dynamic Probes - http://sf.net/projects/dprobes/

TCL extension library for IBM Speech Manager Applications Programming
Interface (SMAPI) - http://sf.net/projects/tclsmapi/

TCK for JWSDL ( JWSDLTCK ) - http://sf.net/projects/jwsdltck/

(from the SourceForge post on that @ http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=44 9291)