Andrej Koelewijn

Just found out about Centos. Centos is a new Linux distribution which aims to be a 100% binary compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This is very good news as Oracle only tests it’s products on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SuSE Linux Enterprise Server. Theoritically you should be able to use another distribution, but i’ve found out that this is not the easiest way. I’ve experienced stability problems on Fedora, and installation problems on another distribution.

Eclipse version 3.0 has been released. Downloads are here , all the changes are documented in on the new and noteworthy page.

About time. Read all about it.

In the Netherlands there is a saying about the summer being cucumbertime time, because there’s no news to report, and all the tv stations are rerunning old programs. Well, this summer, there’s no cucumbertime in IT, that’s for sure.

It’s like a soap or a movie, with big name actors (linux, the handsome young hero, IBM, the old and wise know it all, and SCO, the bad guy, speaking with a german accent, coming from russia), and revolving around big issues as open source and patents.

Most people see three reasons for SCO’s claims: 1) they want to profit from the booming linux market, 2) they are actually working for Microsoft trying to scare people away from linux, or 3) it’s all about their stock price.

I think it’s number four. SCO CEO McBride knows SCO’s going to loose, and he has already written a screenplay and a book about it, and is going to sell it for a lot of money. It’s going to be a sure blockbuster. More info on IMDB (Not yet.)

Now, i’m not sure these days what OSS stands for, is open source software or open source soap?

The JBoss Group forks.

We can all start to write very dramatic blog entries. But i’m not afraid for the future of jboss or it’s use within companies. Both the JBoss group and JBoss Core Developers depend on a successful jboss product. Even if they can’t cooperate on the product, it’s not the end of the world. The code base will be forked, and one will become the leading jboss implementation.

In the inquirer: JBoss 4 and AOP, what gives with it?.

Too often people accuse open source projects of not being innovative and only re-implementing existing standards and software. It’s good to see that the JBoss people are trying to innovate in an area where it’s very much needed, J2EE is too complex, and if JBoss’ use of AOP can simplify this, i’m all for it. Try it, discuss it, and hopefully if we all agree that it’s a good thing then at some point in the future it will end up in the J2EE standards.

GCC version 3.3 just got released, with some java improvements:

• The java.sql and javax.sql packages now implement the JDBC 3.0 (JDK 1.4) API.


• The JDK 1.4 assert facility has been implemented.


• The bytecode interpreter is now direct threaded and thus faster.

More info and a list of the bugs fixed in gcj can be found in the release notes.


Guess it’s time to give gcj another shot. Swing support is still missing, but you should be able to use eclipse swt, or just use it for backend stuff.

Not sure what Kumar is trying to say in his blog. Of course there is a difference between open source and open standards. I think this is recognized by many people. Both are important, although I think open standards are more important than open source.

Recently in the Netherlands some political parties, like groen links, have suggested using open source for government use. This is also happening in other countries, such as Germany. I think this focus on open source is maybe too much. I think it would be better if governments would make open standards mandatory. Simple example, text documents should be based on an open standard, not on Microsoft Word. When looking for new word processing software, only software that supports open standards should be considered. Maybe this would force microsoft to support an open standard in Word, for example the Open Office text format. This would make real competition a possibility, as it would be easier for other companies (or groups) to offer compatible text processing software.

And then the next step may be open source…