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IBM to Open Projects at SourceForge.net

Posted by Zonk on Fri Feb 25, 2005 01:44 PM
from the go-big-blue dept.
Programming IBM IT Technology
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.
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IBM to Open Projects at SourceForge.net 50 Comments More /

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  • Why am I worried.... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by DoraLives (622001) on Friday February 25 2005, @01:46PM (#11779951)
    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?

    • Maybe...

      but remember, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

      I think both IBM and yours (and mine) interests are against Micro$oft.
      • This is not the terrace at a football game, Microsoft is not the enemy. They are merely a competitor to a fraction of OSS projects.

        Open source software lives and thrives within a Windows environment. Given any of the common OS's, I can download and install legal software without paying a penny more. It doesn't matter if I am using a Mac or an x86 or something else, software is available.

        If you want the Linux OS to suceed however, you have to convince Dell and HP and Time and Tiny that the OS on their m

    • Re:Why am I worried.... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by javaxman (705658) on Friday February 25 2005, @02:03PM (#11780145) Journal
      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 ?

      • shit! If a company figures out how to benefit people AND increase their profits, marketshare, and mindshare, then that is GREAT imho!!! That's the way it should be! Do good things and get rewarded. You can take an easier path (not gonna say omg ms is evil or anything, though obviously look at their past, and look at ibm in the 80's, look at sco etc) of taking the approach of exploiting people and excluding others for the sake of locking people in for profit.

        Ibm is behaving great, and I'll support them.
    • Maybe it's too tight. I mean, since IBM started to embrace free software, they haven't done a bad move. On the contrary, they make very intelligent moves. Of course we all know that their purpose is not to make the world better, whatever that means. But it seems that for now the people taking decisions concerning free software at IBM are always trying to do things the right way.
      I mean, when you think about it, does IBM really care if project X'sources, funded by them, are downloadable by everybody ? Oponen

    • Re:Why am I worried.... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by mickwd (196449) on Friday February 25 2005, @03:07PM (#11780844)
      All corporations want it money.

      Lots and lots and lots of money.

      But that's it. Nothing else.

      If they think the best way to make money is by screwing their customers over, then many of them will do it.

      But if a large corporation thinks it can make more money using a different approach, it will.

      Free and open source software is the biggest movement in the software industry today, and is likely to be so for a long time. IBM is riding the wave, so to speak, but is smart enough to realise it's got to give a little as well as take. And it can still make lots of money doing so.

      It's also in its interest to support a movement in which many people (but not all) have a strong dislike of several of their major competitors: Microsoft (deservedly so, I would say), Sun (a little harshly, in my opinion) and, increasingly it would seem, HP.

      • Managements do, however, change. So do corporate policies. One needs to be certain to never trust a corporation so much that one becomes dependent on it, because it may change out from under you.

        I can quite accept that IBM of the current decade has "good" motives. This helps me project the motives of the IBM of 10-15 years from now. But it's no certain guide.

        I put more faith in the GPL...and even there I'm not certain. One never knows what some legislature may decide, or some court.

        For this reason I

  • Amazing (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Rei (128717) on Friday February 25 2005, @01:47PM (#11779962) Homepage
    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 (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Lisandro (799651) on Friday February 25 2005, @01:51PM (#11780008)
      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 (Score:5, Insightful)

      by someguy456 (607900) <someguy456@phreaker.net> on Friday February 25 2005, @01:52PM (#11780030) Homepage Journal
      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...
      • Excuse me for a moment.

        HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

        The only reason IBM is turning around is because they are giving up control of the software. MSFT never had a good product to begin with. Why would anyone continue it. Netscape 4 might of sucked, but Netscape 3 was good. A Base in other words was needed.

          • Re:Amazing (Score:3, Insightful)

            by extra the woos (601736)
            "Unlike just about everyone else, MS can't adopt open source since it kills the only way they've figured out how to make money: charge top dollar for commodity software." I'm not saying your whole post is wrong or anything. But this part is wrong. Look at where MS is going. The last several years they have been moving away from depending on software. They have started realizing what is about to happen, and they are moving to a position where they will provide the hardware you want to have to exit in th

      • Re:Amazing (Score:5, Insightful)

        by sconeu (64226) on Friday February 25 2005, @02:40PM (#11780559) Homepage Journal
        IBM, while dominating and monopolistic in its day, did have a reputation for quality and topnotch research.

        Yes, there is MS Research [microsoft.com] but it's in no way comparable to IBM Research [ibm.com].

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

        • Re:Amazing (Score:4, Funny)

          by loconet (415875) on Friday February 25 2005, @03:54PM (#11781291) Homepage
          "Yes, there is MS Research but it's in no way comparable to IBM Research."

          No kidding, specially when you have research like this at IBM:

          "Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Quantum Computing"

          vs Research like this at MS:


          "Turn Your Photos into Movies
          Researchers from the lab in Beijing have developed a system that can take your still photographs and automatically convert them into motion."

    • Re:Amazing (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Cyno (85911)
      IBM was the Evil Empire of the computer world.

      Today its Microsoft. But how many people love them for it? How many people would switch to a different OS because they believe monopolies are bad? Calling these corporations Evil Empires does nothing to help the ignorant consumer.

      If Microsoft released their source code under the GPL they would also be a geek's best friend. Because geeks like me believe actions speak louder than words. As long as nobody seems to care about the threat a large corporation p

  • IBM's rhype also now open source (Score:5, Informative)

    by Xpilot (117961) on Friday February 25 2005, @01:50PM (#11780002) Homepage
    On a somewhat related note, IBM has released [com.com] rhype [ibm.com], it's research hypervisor as open source under the GPL. This should spice up the free hypervisor community. First Xen [cam.ac.uk], now IBM's rhype. Choice is so good :)

  • Wait... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 25 2005, @01:50PM (#11780005)
    do we like IBM this week?

    • Re:Wait... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Spoing (152917)
      1. do we like IBM this week?

      IBM was a rat bastard company ready to meet it's ultimate demise around 1990. Nobody trusted or liked them...except for the fact that IBM was huge.

      Then, early in the 90s the stock crashed to about 1/3 of it's 1980s price. And stayed there. That woke the shareholders up who decided that the IBM institution had to be obliterated if anything of the share value could be saved.

      Since then, they have gone through multiple reforms. Early on, many of those changes did not improve

  • So what are these apps? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Thirty hello world programs in COBOL?

  • IBM And MONEY (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Indes (323481) on Friday February 25 2005, @01:52PM (#11780026) Homepage
    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 (Score:5, Funny)

      by Stradenko (160417) on Friday February 25 2005, @01:56PM (#11780070) Homepage
      I'm happy to let IBM put its shit in our community wheelbarrow. More shit for everyone can only be good.
    • I don't see it as rude, on the contrary I feel they're trying to show they're part of the community. I get distrustful when a company proclaims it's releasing something as open source, but it's under some weird-ass license I've never seen before and only available from their site. Putting it on sourceforge shows it's the real deal.

    • Re:IBM And MONEY (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Aspirator (862748)
      Sourceforge is the acknowledged place these things
      are coordinated, It is great to see a giant like
      IBM contributing in the 'commoners' forum.

      > but using OpenSource public tools when
      > properly funded seems somewhat.. rude, no?

      Rude? NO. It is a very good thing.
      It is a testament to how good some of the Open Source tools have become.

    • Re:IBM And MONEY (Score:3, Informative)

      by kiore (734594)

      Putting the source code in a repository they neither own nor control makes me feel more comfortable that they are sincere.

      Given IBM's recent history, it didn't surprise me to hear that they are a cash contributor to Sourceforge. The "site sponsors" block on the left of the Sourceforge homepage contains at least one link to an IBM site. I clicked the DB2 link to see where it went ... www14.software.ibm.com

  • Good news for PHP... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bc90021 (43730) * <bc90021@bc900[ ]net ['21.' in gap]> on Friday February 25 2005, @01:53PM (#11780034) Homepage
    ...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 [php.net], you can even use it to write applications, and with IBM behind it, things will likely only improve.

    • Re:Good news for PHP... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by harborpirate (267124) on Friday February 25 2005, @02:18PM (#11780293)
      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.
      • It think it is moslty due to the nature of the language.

        If a project gets complex, and you don't have a compiler to check your code before it runs, refactoring gets really difficult. You can still do some sort of unit testing. But the combination of unit testing and strong type language is much more powerfull.

        If refactoring gets difficult and adjustments have to be implimented due to requirement changes, bugs will start to appear. And they will only rear their heads once the code is executed.

        A class mig

      • PHP... (Score:3, Interesting)

        by einhverfr (238914)
        I program in Perl, Python, and PHP. And I work on large (30k line) programs in both Perl and PHP.

        PHP is a good language for certain classes of applications including web applications in general. But additionally, you can preprocess any text-based file with it too. This means:

        1) Preprocessing configuration files is easy
        2) Web apps are easy to build in PHP
        3) PHP has a number of features that place it *way* ahead of Microsoft's ASP for enterprise applications. Variable-based includes for example.

        That

    • Re:Good news for PHP... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by teknomage1 (854522) on Friday February 25 2005, @02:23PM (#11780350)
      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? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by D4rk Fx (862399) on Friday February 25 2005, @01:53PM (#11780035) Homepage
    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? (Score:4, Informative)

      by UTF-8 (680134) on Friday February 25 2005, @02:16PM (#11780279) Homepage
      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.

  • which 30 projects? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 25 2005, @01:54PM (#11780050)
    are they 30 projects that IBM is interested in or 30 projects that they were planning to abandon but felt they could get some goodwill outof instead?

    • Re:which 30 projects? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by MicroBerto (91055) on Friday February 25 2005, @02:43PM (#11780605)
      Everyone wants to know which projects, and we'll find out soon enough.

      However, I don't like the attitude in the above post. In the grand scheme of things, 30 projects is NOTHING, and it doesn't matter what they do. What matters is if collaboration and support rise and IBM likes the results that they get, they will do it MORE.

      So quit griping - any support is good, and if the community supports it in return, you've made a good ally and have a good future.

  • The Why (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ackthpt (218170) * on Friday February 25 2005, @01:57PM (#11780074) Homepage Journal
    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 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by sameerdesai (654894) on Friday February 25 2005, @01:57PM (#11780076)
    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. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by winkydink (650484) * <sv.dude@gmail.com> on Friday February 25 2005, @01:58PM (#11780090) Homepage Journal
    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).

    • 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.

      Or else maybe there's more than one 'people' out there. But whatever, gripe away.

  • This is a good move, (Score:5, Interesting)

    by robyannetta (820243) on Friday February 25 2005, @02:00PM (#11780113) Homepage
    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.

  • The enemy of my enemy, it's my friend :-D

  • OS/2 ??!! (Score:3, Funny)

    by BitwiseX (300405) on Friday February 25 2005, @02:13PM (#11780250)
    God I hope they put the source code for OS/2 up.. I could use a good laugh. ;)

  • Then again... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Ulric (531205) on Friday February 25 2005, @02:19PM (#11780311) Homepage
    Microsoft Contributes To Open Source Site [crn.com]

  • What projects? (Score:3, Informative)

    by HogGeek (456673) on Friday February 25 2005, @02:23PM (#11780356)
    I tried doing a search for both people and project that contain IBM, but nothing solid.

    Is there a list of software that they donated? I'm curious if its "newer" stuff, of old stuff they no longer user, nor implement themselves...

  • What about the cloudscape contest? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by stm2 (141831) <sbassi@@@asalup...org> on Friday February 25 2005, @04:16PM (#11781656) Homepage Journal
    This may seems OT, I am not sure. But IBM sponsored a contest in Sourceforge (with iPODs as prices). It was supposed to announce winners Feb 18 but I still don know what happened. My JAVA-fu were good according to IBM, but I still didn got any notification about who won.
    BTW, I didn need to code JAVA at all, just use a IBM tutorial-game as example and soved without programing :)

  • List of projects (Score:4, Informative)

    by shutdown -p now (807394) <int19h@@@gmail...com> on Friday February 25 2005, @06:36PM (#11783232)
    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)

    • Re:I wish there was RHP instead of PHP (Score:4, Insightful)

      by gregarican (694358) on Friday February 25 2005, @03:46PM (#11781185) Homepage
      There is this [rubyonrails.org]. I am a Ruby convert as well. I think it's so much cleaner than other scripting languages. Most of it "just makes sense." I personally am not using it not so much as a web app framework as a replacement for my company's plethora of ASP work. Using eRuby on Apache I hope to keep things moving along...

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