Re: Is this really new ?

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.