IBM Corp. said in August that it would upgrade parts of its WebSphere Studio family of developer tools in coming weeks, promising to reduce the time it takes to build Java-based applications. IBM plans to ship version 5.1 of WebSphere Studio Application Developer, priced from US$3,500 per developer, and version 5.1 of WebSphere Studio Site Developer, essentially a subset of Application Developer, priced from US$1,000 per developer.
SCO developers take issue with GPL stance
While The SCO Group Inc.’s upper management has taken a dim view of Linux’s software license, the GPL (GNU General Public License), SCO developers at the company’s annual user conference in Las Vegas last month expressed dissatisfaction with SCO’s public disparagement of the software licence. “The OpenServer compiler is crap. Without (the GCC) they would be up the creek,” said Hans Anderson, the director of software development with Price Data Systems in Louisville, Ky.
Smartphone SDK ready for download
Software developers can begin developing applications for the next generation of smart phones based on Microsoft Corp. operating software, as the company has posted a software development kit (SDK) for Windows Mobile 2003-based Smartphones on its developer Web site. Like Windows Mobile 2003-based Pocket PCs, Smartphone 2003 devices will run software based on Windows CE .Net 4.2.
Big Blue plans for open future
IBM Corp. is shedding its proprietary past and embracing an open standards future. “Every business in this industry has a proprietary past,” said Al Zollar, general manager, iSeries, IBM Systems Group. Apart from IBM, enterprise players such as Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems are also supporting more and more open source-based software. According to Zollar, the open source movement is a factor that will help to bring on faster creation of de facto standards.
