Jikes released as Open Source

Jikes has been released as Open Source today, under the following pretty unrestrictive licence, which has been endorsed by Bruce Perens of Open Source. This is a big step since Jikes is a leading Java compiler and is really fast. It also signals the first Open Source license that IBM has crafted, this being their original code. I hope this will be the beginning of a successful relationship between IBM and the Open Source community. Read below the slashdot exclusive nerd announcement from Dave Shields, one of the Jikes co-authors and the open-source contact for Jikes.

Jikes is Now Open Source

On behalf of IBM Research, Philippe Charles and Dave Shields are pleased to announce that the IBM Research Jikes Compiler is now an Open Source Project. You can download the source now.

We will continue to work on the compiler, emphasizing -- as we always have -- strict adherence to the Java Language Specification, and will also continue to seek Sun's guidance on the proper interpretation of the specification where we find the intent to be unclear.

All discussion will be carried out in full public view using mailing lists. You can subscribe here.

We look forward to collaborating with the Java and Open Source communities to make Jikes an even better compiler, and will welcome voluntary contributions early in 1999 -- after we've all had a chance to get acquainted via the mailing list before hacking away, and after the two of us take some vacation time.

We wish to thank the many Slashdot readers who gave of their time to respond to our query "Should IBM Release the Source Code for Jikes?" (see the Comment Summary) , and also thank Sengan Baring-Gould (slashdot), Nelson Minar (MIT) and Bruce Perens (opensource.org) -- they helped make this happen.

End of announcement

Ok here are the pitfalls you may encounter in getting Jikes up and running, so beware: the zipped distribution contains text in DOS-format, so gnu make chokes on it. Make sure you unzip with the -a option. The tar.gz version has the files in *NIX format. Also, some distributions, such as Red Hat 4.2 do not have wchar.h which is needed. I got it to compile by making sure the Red Hat (libc5) entry was the last above OBJECTS in the Makefile and executing touch /usr/include/wchar.h as root. Also you'll need the JDK from blackdown.org to compile anything with jikes.

True story: Dave Shields ate out at a Chinese restaurant Saturday. His fortune: "Very soon, and in pleasant company"! That's us ;-)