Java inches closer to open source

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IBM to Open Source Fortran, REXX, or SQL?

IBM's greater days of contributing to language development are long over. The last significant contribution was SQL.

As far as giving anything away...the only thing IBM has ever given away is SCO's source code...after taking it for their own AIX/370 and AIX-PS/2 operating systems.

Contractors & programmers at IBM's Palo Alto Research Center served as a virtual FTP hub in 1988-1990 between Locus Computing Corp. (LCC), SCO, and IBM Austin to move code from Amdahl's UTS Unix, SCO's Xenix, SCO Unix, and a bunch of other Unix source trees like ACIS 4.2 (IBM's academic flavor of Bezerkly Unix).

They were in a rush to get something better than the IBM RT-PC and its 70 diskette based AIX to market. IBM Austin worked on the RISC System/6000, while Locus Computing, IBM Kingston, and IBM Palo Alto worked on AIX/370 and AIX-PS/2.

They pulled so many copyright headers off of other company's Unix source and substituted IBM's own copyright header that no one would recognize the code anymore without a great deal of effort.

Stupidly, IBM programmers & contractors left the TERMCAP files the same, the terminal I/O & serial port code the same, and a bunch of other improvement's SCO made to their Unix in order to support their ASCII terminal based customers.

IBM make money hand over fist? Don't think so. Like General Motors, the only money they have made in the last 10 years is off earnings from their pension plan. Now that they've terminated it, the best they can hope for is double digit inflation to erode their pension debt away.

Posted by:   Posted on: 05/16/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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