Hoping to accelerate the development of Linux applications for corporate users, JYACC Tuesday announced it was making available the source code for its Panther Open Source Software for Linux (POSSL) to the open source community.
Officials of the New York-based company believe the move will speed enhancements to the core technology, making it easier to build transaction-oriented, component-based applications for the Web. Those enhancements in turn will help developers and corporate users to build more compelling applications for both servers and desktops systems, the latter long dominated by Microsoft Corp.'s Windows, company officials believe.
In concert with the announcement CollabNet Inc., developer of open source collaborative development platforms, is providing its SourceCast environment as the infrastructure for possl.org, a new site for coordinating open-source development for POSSL.
"What is holding back Linux on the desktop is the rich supply of applications for Windows. What this [POSSL] provides is a development environment specifically geared to that," said Bernie Mills, Collabnet's vice president of marketing.
JYACC officials said an advisory board to be elected by the possl.org developer community will eventually manage the site. That board will direct all activities and resources of the possl.org organization.
"The success of Linux has only just begun with applications centered mostly around Web servers, e-mail, and print servers," said Rich Westle, JYACC's CEO. "But with this [POSSL], Linux as a development and deployment platform is positioned to grow more rapidly through an enterprise," he said.
POSSL, which is based on the Panthera, application environment, includes an Enterprise JavaBean component builder and is the environment used for IBM Corp.'s Websphere Application Server. POSSL's source code license is modeled after the BSD license and allows for the unrestricted use of POSSL code for both open source and proprietary software.
Earlier this month, Sun Microsystems Inc. announced it was making some 9 million lines of source code of its Star Office code available (www.OpenOffice.org). That project's code management, discussion groups, and the tracking of source code is also being managed by CollabNet's SourceCast platform.
For more information about New York-based JYACC, users can go to www.JYACC.com. Users interest in finding out more about CollabNet, based in San Francisco, can go to www.collab.net.