Re: Is this really new ?

[Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen <ravn@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Mike Pavlak skrev:
> around PHP was, is and always will be vibrant.  Now Sun released Java to
> the open source community and what have we heard?  Are there any
> EXCITING contributions that the community is making to Java?  I'm not
> saying that there isn't anything good being done but really exciting?
>   
Depends on your definition of EXCITING :)

There are in my point of view two essential wins:

* It is now possible to port and distribute "Java" on any platform and 
not only those sanctioned by Sun.
 This gives the full freedom to choose platform.  Notably the FreeBSD 
folks have been happy about
 this.

* You are guaranteed that the Java technology will survive Sun, even if 
Sun was bought and Java shut down for ever.

The above means that Java code will live forever (the Cobol of the 21 
century :) ), and I have found that Java programs are _MAINTAINABLE_ 
which is a very important feature of such a programming language :)

The OpenSourceing of Java is not done yet - it is not yet possible to 
build the Sun code without binary chunks but almost.    Hence it is 
still to early to ask what exciting things the community has done yet


> IBM i is a mature product with a highly obscure architecture (don't
> forget the SLIC).  Not every hacker on the i5 is ready to tackle that
> kind of OS.  I not saying one or two out there wouldn't try it.  Maybe
> even do it some good.  Where would the excitement be?  In the long run I
> do not see a community growing up fast enough to make it worthwhile
> unless IBM cut the development tribe loose from Rochester and they had
>   
There is a crucial problem point with the i:  It is for paying customers 
only!

If you want people to work on the i for fun and build a community 
(instead of working to earn the payment for the i) it needs to be easily 
accessible.  Linux is available to download on any PC for free and Linus 
was able to build a developer community.

> to fend for themselves.  I think IBM did the right thing with Eclipse by
> turning it loose to the open source community early on.  That allowed a
>   
AND they built a community!  People feel it is worth contributing - one 
way for them to do that, is for easy bug reporting, and prompt and 
visible actions on the bugs (the actual fixing is another matter).

See the demise of OpenDarwin for how NOT to build a community.

For the original theme of this post - there is a complete graphical 
client available as the AIX binaries (X11) so a good start could be 
having an X11 version of the Client Access Emulator available on the 
machine directly.  It is ported to Linux so hopefully it shouldn't be 
TOO hard.