The Linux operating
system continues to build momentum, confounding the pundits who have been
predicting for years that when the smoke cleared, only Windows would be
left standing.
The latest news involves Scriptics.
Scriptics provides developer support for the Tcl language and is run by
John Osterhout, the language’s creator.
Tcl, an extendible open source scripting language, is used by more than
500,000 developers for numerous applications. One of its strengths is
hooking applications together, which makes it perfect for Web development.
It also provides for rapid GUI programming using the Tk library.
Their new TclPro 1.1 release has a GUI-based source-level debugger,
compiler, and syntax checker and supports technologies such as CORBA and
ActiveX. It runs on the most popular developer platforms like Windows 95
and NT, Solaris, and HP-UX, but the new version runs on SGI platforms and
RedHat Linux as well.
In a telephone interview, Osterhout told InternetNews.com that Linux has
been the most popular platform for downloads after Windows, and that many
developers were interested in paid support for the Linux platform –
further confounding those pundits who claim that Linux is popular only
because it’s free.
In related news, Berkeley Software Design
Inc. announced its commercial BSDI Internet Super Server product and
BSD/OS — Unix-based products — would support running Linux applications
directly.