IBM Taking Rational Software Toward Open SourceIBM Taking Rational Software Toward Open Source

IBM is submitting a good amount of its Rational software process platform and related material to the Eclipse Foundation, the first step toward open-sourcing that material.

Specifically, the company is donating the meta model for describing development processes, the tools for customizing and creating processes, and a portion of the Rational Unified Process (RUP), said Roger Oberg, vice president of IBM's Rational group, based in Lexington, Mass.

The move is the latest in a series of contributions that IBM has made to Eclipse, an organization it helped found, as well as to Sourceforge.net, Apache.org and other open-source efforts.

The Eclipse Foundation will review, accept or modify IBM’s latest submission, and in all likelihood the foundation will release an Eclipse process framework sometime next year, Oberg told CRN on Tuesday. "Rational created what many thought of as the de facto standard for development, but you had to use Rational tools. We did all the authoring, and although we solicited best practices [from outside] we were the control point for the tooling, framework and content," he said.

"The state change here is that by providing the meta model, tooling and a good chunk of the basic processes, the control point is turned over to the community," Oberg said.

IBM hopes to add value to the more generic open-source foundation and continue to charge for it. Asked if IBM was losing a revenue stream with the Rational donation, Oberg said the benefits exceed potential downside.

"The upside here is far greater than any risk we see. We won't have folks wondering whether to use these effective processes because they don't want to lock in,” he said. “We say the important thing is that we as an industry get locked into best processes at the basic level and the framework for describing them and tooling to customize them. We'll get commercial interest in additional content and supporting that process in our tooling."

Chris Armstrong, president of Armstrong Process Group, a New Berlin, Wis.-based IBM partner that provides training and certification content for software development, welcomed the news. "We're aboard because software processes are our business, and businesses are struggling to build [processes] practically and reliably. Anything that helps that is good for us," he said.

The question is how much of any company's intellectual property gets offered to open source, Armstrong added. "Generally speaking, my philosophy is that most of it should be given away. The real opportunity for revenue is in service and licensing of content," he said.

IBM's Oberg agreed that although services are a money-maker, there’s also money to be made in higher-level content. "There's opportunity in tools enhancements, so it's not strictly services. [There's] certainly opportunity for content enhancements that might leverage a partner's expertise,” he said. “There are probably few companies that have as much experience as IBM around real scalable projects. We'll continue to evolve and leverage that unique knowledge."

IBM bought Rational Software two years ago. Since then, Microsoft has launched what many see as a direct assault on Rational's development tools and model with its upcoming Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition.

IBM characterizes its tools strategy as targeting heterogeneous shops--those that typically use both Java- and .Net-based technology. Microsoft is considered more .Net-centric, although the Redmond, Wash.-based software company pledges interoperability.