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More Open Source and Linux Support from IBM
Neville writes "IBM moved its developerworks out of beta and launched it with a new Open Source Zone. Current open source projects include jikes, a java compiler that works blazingly fast in Debian, BSD, and RH. Jikes is tres cool - as usual, IBM actually implements java better than Sun. Maybe this is what it takes to finally get java and linux to mesh, and maybe I can finally convert my last Solaris x86 box to linux. They also offer a Linux Zone with info on Python and GNOME. "
Back in the 70's and 80's, IBM was like a tyrannical, abusive father, but it has turned out to be one hell of a cool grandfather...
"Be nice, veer left, and never stop thinking" Iain Banks - Walking On Glass
Knowledge is power -- knowledge shared is power lost. -- Aleister Crowley.
This comment get to the heart of the divide between big companies and open source / free software / whatever (and capitalise those terms to taste, btw):
Although big companies are primarily about making as much money as possible, they know that to make a lot of it, power (a monopoly or other device) is required. Thus, in the long term at least, the sharing of knowledge is an anathema.
Of course, one can make money without such motives; just not as much. In this milleu, altruism, regrettably, leads to the local, but not the global, maximum.
So while open source is a useful tactic for small companies, at most it is a temporary ploy of large ones who are aiming for an entirely different prize.
remove the sz's from my email to use it
Open source code greatly reduces the ability of a company to screw a user community. IBM has been doing some good things lately, so why not forgive them some of their past sins and thank them for their participation?
I use jikes only for the development cycle, for production it is always javac. I did not look into the matter, but I noticed that my application consumes much more memory if compiled with jikes. Its also somewhat slower. Additionally jikes compiled classes break my obfuscator. Anyway for quick compile/test/debug cycles you can't beat jikes.
just my 2c
Thomas
One of the things I like most about IBM's Open Source moves is the license.
This isn't a "It should be BSD/GPL/MPL" post. I'm not going to discuss which is "better" (ther is no answer). Instead, I think the the IBM license is almmost optimal for a commercial organization that wants to contribute to Open Source.
Why do I say this? Well, it not only is quite friendly to other licenses, it also adresses two critical issues for companies: Patent Licensing and assumed Liability. These are not really well defined in most of the other Open Source licenses. IBM did a good job with it.
I'd really like to see the Open Source community rally around 3 or 4 licenses. Rather than having the huge proliferation that we have now, I think it would be really beneficial to have a couple of licenses, each tailored to a specific group. That is, make a definative statement about the goals each of the 3-4 licenses, and really, really encourage (with a bat, if necessary (wink,wink)) companies to pick one of them, rather than make their own. I think the IBM license is good enough that it should be one of the 3-4 (I'll leave the other choices for you to war over...)
Now, I'd be really happy if IBM created a Open Source highly-tuned VM/java library set....
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
It always strikes me that IBM, perceived as the Big Brother for the last 15 years, is in reality a really great company that does a lot of cool stuff.
-- The word "woman" is not politically correct any longer.
The word "woman" is no longer politically correct.
You should use "Female-American" instead.
FWIW, I grabbed Jikes a little while ago as soon as I heard about it. If you don't know, Jikes is a Java bytecode compiler, not a virtual machine. It won't make Java run faster on your Linux box (the alphaworks JIT JVM 1.1.8 is what you want for speed, but it's not open-source).
Jikes stresses compliance to Sun's published standards. It was kind of interesting to read through the source and find comments where they had run into contradictions in the standard. Beyond that, Jikes also reportedly compiles Java really quickly.
I built Jikes from source on a SuSE 6.0 install with a 2.2.9 kernel. I was pretty impressed with how well they set up the make -- it detected compiler options and built with no problems. Word of warning, though, it took several minutes on my P166 with 64 meg.
All I can say is that IBM is impressing the heck out of me these days. My sincere thanks for releasing such a strong compiler under an open license.
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
> Maybe this is what it takes to finally get Java and Linux to mesh
Are all the pieces available for a full open-source Java on Linux environment? Let's see:
Jikes is the compiler
Kaffe is the runtime (or maybe Japhar)
classpath.org is the core libraries
Blackdown is probably the choice for a pure Sun-derived implementation, but they've fallen a little bit behind the Sun release schedule. Is there enough need for Java-on-linux to provide a business justification for a full-fledged, funded, kickass Linux Java implementation?
Disclaimer: I've built some Java VM technology, using Linux as a development base
I learned about jikes a few months ago at my (NT-based) employer and was pleased to discover that it also ran on my RedHat Linux box at home, and yes, it IS fast. So fast I had to check to make sure that it actually compiled the files. The difference is that sun's javac is implemented mostly in java itself, while jikes is C++ (owch)
At the same time I discovered IBM's JDK for Linux , and I prefer it over Blackdown. The IBM jdk requires native threads, so if that's an issue get the Blackdown green threads jdk. (It's at 1.1.8, I hope their 1.2 shows up soon).
For you Visual Age fans, IBM has a Linux version available for preview now also.
IBM may be be the best Java tools company out there.
Now, first of all, I want to make something clear: I love jikes. It is blazingly fast, and the obvious choice during the develop/test/debug cycle. Plus I like its error messages on incorrect code better than Javac's.
However, I have a contention with the following statement: "IBM actually implements java better than Sun"
If this is a comment on Jikes (as opposed to, for example, IBM's JIT compiler), its a misleading comment. Jikes and Javac are like apples and oranges. Jikes was designed to be a fast java compiler, plain and simple. This means that it does few optimizations to the output bytecode when compared to Javac. Which in turn means that Jikes-produced code may execute more slowly than Javac-produced code.
(I say might because a good JIT compiler may be able to perform the same optimizations that Javac does on the output from Jikes, thus making the usefulness of Javac's work moot)
So lets just keep these sorts of issues in mind when discussing compilers.
That said, YAY IBM!
arvind rulez
IBM has done a lot of good stuff since getting knocked off of their pedestal back in the day. (Well, except that they didn't marker OS/2 very well). I often wonder if even (gasp) Microsoft could be "good" if they ever realized that they aren't the only option in the computing world.
For a company the size of IBM, they have turned to support OSS/Linux remarkably quickly. Unlike Sun who can't seem to relinquish control (witness their community source licence), IBM is actually willing to offer us (some of their) crown jewles.
...
Of course the fact that IBM has lots of (technological) crown jewels probably made this decision easier for them. Still, they have put their money where their mouth is. I hope that the Linux community appreciates their contributions and rewards them, be in with money or simply mindshare. A decent Java implementation would do much to further demonstrate the enterprise-readiness of Linux
As the Debian maintainer for Jikes, I have been incredibly impressed with IBM's serious adoption of Open Source. With the original Jikes release, there were problems with the license which prevented it from being included in Debian's main distribution. When these problems were brought to IBM's attention, they immediately agreed to get their lawyers to work on a revision. The end result is that Debian now has a completely free Java implementation available for those who can accept the limitations of Kaffe's runtime library, and a truly fast and robust alternative to Sun's javac even for those who use the JDK runtime.
Peace and love, y'all
GCC 2.95 (with libgcj) now has support for compiling (non-graphical) Java code to native binaries. If you had hoped Jikes would do this, well, look into GCJ at
Cygnus
and try using it. The binaries are indeed much faster than loading up a JVM, parsing bytecode, running it...
Jikes, on the other hand, compiles Java to bytecode much faster than javac. On the order of 10 to 100 *TIMES* faster. Use it instead of javac.
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
Well, sometimes, anyway. "agree to disagree", I meant to say. Beyond that.. too much noise, not enough signal from me today. Time to sleeeep.. *cheers all around*
~ Kish
Hi, I'm in Austin, TX. Today was the end of IBM's first "Linux Summit". There will be more... If you have a problem with Jikes, visit us at http://ibm.com/developerworks/opensource and use the Jitterbug system to report it. We'll try to fix it ASAP. By the way, the machine that serves up the Jikes Project Pages from dW is running RH Linux 6.0, from outside the IBM firewall. We plan to open up the CVS tree for write-access from outside IBM soon. We want to wait until we get v1.07 out, as Philippe is currently making (lots of) changes needed to get the LocalVariableTable right, which will fix a known problem with debug support. Note that Jikes is now in the "free" part of Debian, is included in Red Hat's main distribution, and the license has been approved by OSI. The mail lists should be up soon. We are waiting for Ken Coar (IBM, Apache) to check out the Majordomo setup. By the way, I'm leaving soon to have dinner with the chap who manages the developerworks/opensource site. Exciting times indeed, and who would have thunk it...from IBM. I know I wouldn't -- a year ago. Now -- I LOVE IT! Dave Shields shields@watson.ibm.com Jikes Project Core Team Member
Excuse me?
I'm interested in hearing your example of an innovative company.
Thanks
Bruce Perens
Bruce Perens.
Why don't they open source OS/2? In a manner similiar to the initial Mozilla source release.
This would be a graceful end for that operating system
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Personally, I'm waiting for jinkies -- the Java debugger that discovers what's behind run-time errors (and what would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for those pesky kids).
IBM has simply chosen to follow a path of enlightened self-interest. They built Jikes on their own dime, built OpenDX on their own dime (yes, I know full well that it was mostly to sell SP2's back in 1994, but they opened it and freely licensed the patents on the code), built a Linux JVM on their own dime, and support the Perl DBI interface on their own dime.
It's the customers, stupid. They asked for this.
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
*That* I'm sure I don't know :) KDE was there first. It is also more mature. I frequently switch between Gnome and KDE, Gnome has a few bugs with the version I'm using, KDE has more mature applications. Actually, I need to upgrade everything here :)
-Brent--
- Seth Finkelstein
One of our dev servers blew up in the middle of that comment. Lost track of what I was saying. Oops.
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.