OStatic

By Nate D'Amico

For the Eclipse lovers out there, IBM has another free toy for you to experiment with. It's geared toward web application development, and is dubbed Project Zero. With Project Zero, IBM hopes to entice Java, PHP, and Groovy developers to use its platform for creating next generation web applications. Among the interesting aspects of Project Zero, developers are encouraged to compile PHP into Java classes to have it run in the same Java Virtual Machine (JVM) as the rest of Project Zero's Java code. The project leverages communities in ways that open sourcers will recognize.

In case you were wondering, Red Hat--fresh off a rosy earnings report that was interpreted by analysts as a welcoming present for new CEO Jim Whitehurst--won't deliver a desktop product for consumers anytime soon. In a news post at the company's site, team members write: We have no plans to create a traditional desktop product for the consumer market in the foreseeable future.

While there has been much speculation that Red Hat might target the consumer desktop, I'm not surprised by this news. Why isn't the company delivering such a product? Because it doesn't need to.

Gartner is out with a new report that predicts that soon all businesses will use open source software--although there are some open source warnings too.....

Wired has an interesting item on supercharging Canon digital cameras using open source software.....

When asked about the future direction of Sun Microsystems, one of the company's new managing directors highlighted open source as a key focus.....

Dojo has stabilized and released a new version of its open source Ajax toolkit, backed by IBM, Sun and AOL....

Recently, I was talking to a tech journalist friend of mine who has been covering Microsoft since the company's inception. He made the point that nobody at Microsoft knows the whole code base of the Windows operating system anymore. Individuals once did, but the operating system is a big ball of code that no single developer knows from end to end.

That was the thought that came to mind when I saw the just-released survey on Linux Kernel Development from the Linux Foundation. The survey provides an exhaustive and fascinating glimpse at what it describes as one of the largest cooperative software projects ever attempted.