One of the perks of working with the folks on the IBM Linux Team is that I come into contact with impressive people and interesting technology on a fairly regular basis... something I enjoy. So when the 25 IBM Linux Scholar Challenge winners were selected from among the 1462 applicants, I thought it would be interesting to see what they might have in common. I've pulled out a few excerpts of their comments, and offered a few observations.

They all spoke English, a lucky thing for me, and 15 of the 25 Linux Scholars Challenge winners had time to respond in the short time I allowed. I don't have the space to include comments from all of them here, but I sincerely did appreciate all of their responses.

Among the things I wondered about was what does Linux tool usage look like on a global scale? What editors, compilers, debuggers, IDEs and so forth do they use?

Though a couple of the Linux scholars mentioned KDevelop, almost all were into straight text for their Linux work, and divided fairly evenly between vi or VIM, and emacs. Francesco Regazzoni, who lives near Lake Como in Italy writes: "Usually I develop my programs with VIM (or vi) and I compile it using the last version of GCC. I usually debug by command line. I like every tool for configuration (Linuxconf?) but I think that one of most useful for Linux is Midnight Commander, fast and quite user friendly."

Veselin Kanev, a twenty year old university student in Varna's Technical University in Bulgaria also uses VIM as an editor and GCC/G++ compiler. "For me," he writes, "the most important applications on a Linux box are the VIM editor, GCC compiler, the Apache web server with PHP module installed and the mp3blaster of course ;)"

On the emacs side, Michael Berhanu, a third year IT student at the Australian National University says "for C/C++, I use emacs and GCC/G++. I find emacs to be one of the most important tools that I use for application development."

And Frank Kruchio, a Hungarian studying in New Zealand explained that he uses LateX for documentation and essay writing, but Emacs/GDB/GCC/G++/ for all other programming related tasks. Except for Java, when he uses IBM's JDK. (Frank speaks five languages, too; there may be a pattern here).

I was also curious about what the Linux scholars like about writing code?

Barnaby Gray, a Computer Science student, Churchill College at Cambridge says he started coding when he was ten or eleven. "I think of coding almost like art - an expression of creativity. Seeing something you've created working, and then other people's enjoyment from using good software, that's probably what appeals most."

Uwe Walter from the University of Karlsruhe in Germany began when he was thirteen or fourteen. "I like the idea of creating or building something new. Almost an artistic thing."

Helmut Cantzler, who's working on his PhD in A.I. at the University of Edinburgh writes: "Programming is for me like creating something lasting which perhaps is useful for other people too! It is my way of being creative!"

Gao Feng from Nanjing University in China began describing his thoughts about Linux like a typical engineer: "I think that the merits of Linux are stability, efficiency and strong networking functions. The most important is scalability, you can customize it for your needs." But then he adds, "It's XWindows is very appealing and beautiful. (... ) As a Linux fan, I always like to know why and how, not just what." Feng also confided that "Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds are my gods."

Linux theology notwithstanding, these responses were fairly typical. I think it's notable that all these students use tools that are free; some in the sense of free beer and some in the GNU sense of free. But while free in any sense of the word is good for students, if they can touch the code it's even better. That may be obvious, but I think it's worth repeating. Free and open tools really matter, and their widespread, global availability and continuous improvement may help account for the deep worldwide entrenchment of Linux and open source.

It's also interesting that so many in this group look at code or coding in a creative, artistic way. They seem to have an eye for seeing beauty in the software, for finding the elegant solution. It's a cliche that prodigies in the hard sciences like to pull things apart to examine them, see how they work, and then try to improve them. With open source, it may be no different.

The general availability of Linux and open source means students from almost arbitrary cultural, social and economic groups worldwide may find creative expression by tinkering with open source code on old PCs... using free but sophisticated editors and compilers, which may themselves also be pulled apart and examined to see how they work. Where will Linux be in five years? In twenty? Perhaps these Linux scholars, and others like them, will become the Stallmans and Torvalds of the future, doing work in settings we haven't yet imagined.

Rayme Jernigan is the managing editor of the IBM Linux portals. He has published articles through several publications and content sites including JavaWorld, IBM/developerWorks, and Javasoft at Sun Microsystems. He was the founder and first president of the Triangle Java Users Group, and can be reached at rayme@us.ibm.com.

Note: All trademarks are the property of their respective holders.