IBM plans to contribute a subset of the IBM Rational Unified Process (RUP) to the Eclipse Foundation, an open source community that provides a free, Java-based platform to more easily produce software. A collection of methods and best practices for promoting quality and efficiency throughout software development projects, RUP has guided developers in projects ranging from small-scale product development to large industrial-strength systems. IBM's donation will also provide a foundation architecture and Web tools for the industry to engineer, collaborate on, share, and reuse software development best practices.
IBM's donation is designed to promote a collaborative, industry-wide effort to synthesize, share, and automate development processes and best practices among independent software vendors, IT organizations building integrated software systems, academia, the research community, and individual software professionals on small or large teams. If widely adopted, IBM envisions that RUP could improve software development practices within organizations and throughout the industry. It also could improve the ability to quickly respond to business and market changes that businesses are achieving through standardization in other areas, such as Web services and service-oriented architecture (SOA) standards that integrate previously siloed data and applications with customers, partners, and suppliers.
According to IBM, nearly half of software development organizations within companies have begun process-related initiatives to improve the governance and predictability of software projects. The donation of the RUP subset can provide an architecture and tools to form the basis of an ecosystem in which software practitioners, technology vendors, universities, researchers, and others can communicate, publish, and reuse best practices.
"By contributing intellectual property to establish a common, open industry framework and ecosystem around software development, we hope to foster more innovation by encouraging developers everywhere to reuse assets," said Daniel Sabbah, IBM Rational Software general manager. "IBM is doing for the software development process what Eclipse has done for the integration of software tools, what Apache did for Web application servers, and what Linux did for operating systems. Software practitioners at large companies, independent software vendors, systems integrators, and in government and academia will be able to collaborate more easily and drive better-managed and higher quality software projects. By rethinking software development practices to emphasize smarter processes and higher-quality outcomes, companies will reach new levels of innovation while obtaining productivity gains characteristic of an on-demand business."
IBM participates in and contributes to more than 150 open source projects, including Linux, the Globus Alliance, Apache, Eclipse, Cloudscape, the contribution of accessibility technology to Mozilla to make the Firefox browser easier to use by people with disabilities, and the donation of 500 patents.