IBM officials said the company will donate a subset of the IBM Rational Unified Process to the open-source community. RUP is a development methodology that comes out of IBM Software Group’s Rational business unit. Grady Booch, an IBM fellow and Rational’s chief scientist, said RUP is a vast collection of methods and best practices for promoting quality and efficiency throughout software development projects.
It’s a sad day when IBM donates code and no one is jumping for joy. Who was there from the community to receive the code?
The reality comes to bite – where are the developers?. where is the money? Meanwhile in other news Skype just made 2 billion by being proprietary. Apple just released Video iPOD and it’s not open source!
It’s a sad day when IBM donates code and no one is jumping for joy. Who was there from the community to receive the code?
The reality comes to bite – where are the developers?. where is the money? Meanwhile in other news Skype just made 2 billion by being proprietary. Apple just released Video iPOD and it’s not open source!
Just to let you know, most of the Eclipse developers talk on their mailing lists/IRC, not on OSNews. So to say that there isn’t enthusiasm based on what you see on OSNews just makes you look stupid.
Oh, and I’ll give you a brief introduction to the concept of FTP servers and email. You see, if someone submits code to a project, there doesn’t actually have to be someone on the other end to “receive” it. It will actually reside on the server until someone gets around to “receiving” it. Purty fascinating technology huh?
You mean to say there are developers who actually use Eclipse?
IBM is only “donating” these things in an attempt to actually get people to use Eclipse, which they seem to have some self interest in.
And they also want to attract people to their Rational line of software.
The reality though is that Eclipse is far from usable (compared to for example Visual Studio) and throwing in some random Rational tools won’t help much.
If IBM really wanted to help the “OSS cause” they would open up everything they currently have that competes with their own OSS offerings, as well as other things they have. Don’t for one second think that IBM is actually doing these small things for the “community”.
You are quite clueless on this topic I reckon.. I know tons of people who uses Eclipse on every kind of project. And Visual Studio looks like a joke as compared to Eclipse. please get real.
IMHO the VS2k5 far better then Eclipse. Yes, a little bit more expensive, but a little bit more advanced.
>And Visual Studio looks like a joke as compared to Eclipse. please get real.
I have used Visual Studio 6, 2003 and 2005beta2, as well as Eclipse.
Eclipse doesn’t come near Visual Studio in usefulness and ease to use. We were evaluating Eclipse (and other IDE’s) at work to see if there was something better that we could migrate to. Eclipse got the worst scores overall. KDevelop got pretty good scores in our evaluation, but didn’t reach high enough. Other IDE’s evaluated include CodeForge, Anjuta and Borland’s Builder suites. In the end we decided to stay with Visual Studio.
So maybe there are people that use Eclipse out there, but how many of them are forced to use it and how many actually WANTS to use it?
I’m willing to bet that the majority of them are forced to use it.
That is great news! It is things like these that will enable Eclipse to attract more users and increase the gap between Eclipse and Netbeans. Funny how despite being Sun’s offering, Netbeans seems like it is perpetually behind Eclipse.
Netbeans seems like it is perpetually behind Eclipse.
In my experience it has been the opposite. You can’t get very far doing J2EE using Eclipse without shopping around for plugins. We used Netbeans because it supports J2EE “out of the box” and allows us to deploy remotely to our Sun Appserver instances.
Traditionally rafactoring has been Eclipse’s main advantage over Netbeans, but in the latest Netbeans beta (5.0) most of the Eclipse refactoring features are supported.
The Netbeans 5.0 form editor Matisse is in the same league as VS (in some areas). The Eclipse VE is much slower and laying out components relies on more traditional layout managers.
I will agree that about a year and a half ago Eclipse was vastly superior to Netbeans, but in the last couple of releases Netbeans has pulled ahead.
IMHO Netbeans has a better windowing system too.
Just my opinion. I would be interested to find out what features you feel Eclipse offers which Netbeans lacks.
The new beta is very nice:
http://www.netbeans.org/community/releases/50/index.html
As is the profiler:
http://www.netbeans.org/kb/articles/nb-profiler-tutor-8.html
Netbeans is very nice, but the JSP/JSF form editor is missing. Without external plugins the Netbeans is better, but with this plugins the Eclipse is the king. But IMHO Visual Studio is better then this tools.
Netbeans is very nice, but the JSP/JSF form editor is missing. Without external plugins the Netbeans is better, but with this plugins the Eclipse is the king. But IMHO Visual Studio is better then this tools.
Netbeans doesn’t have a visual form designer for JSP/JSF, but this is offered as a separate product called Java Studio Creator (which is build on Netbeans platfrom). Oracle JDeveloper preview has a visual JSP/JSF designer if you are looking for one too. It is free.
BTW what Eclipse plugins do you prefer to use (and what do they cost).
I have also used VS 6, VS2003 and VS2005 and find that Netbeans 5.0 and Eclipse 3.1 offer much better refactoring support and other nice options such as editor abbreviations, fix imports etc. The biggest problem with VS2005 is that you (obviously) cannot deploy to Linux or Solaris.
You’re clueless – and I think you might even know it.
What does Apple’s iPod (which is hardware, BTW) have to do w/ open source *SOFTWARE*!?
Eclipse and Netbeans are outstanding products and are both open source…and are rapidly updated and wildly popular – there is no standing still here!
It’s Christmas, RUP rocks and so does Eclipse, thank you big blue!
IBM wants Eclipse to be a huge success because they make money from it. No, not directly, but once companies become “IBM shops” via Eclipse, they are much more likely to buy the Eclipse add on Websphere. This is good for IBM, and good for us. If companies go with Visual Studio because of the IDE, then they certainly won’t be using Websphere.
IBM has always been a services based company. They want Eclipse to be successfull so they can sell services that revolve around Eclipse.
Jim
IBM has always been a services based company. They want Eclipse to be successfull so they can sell services that revolve around Eclipse.
If the software is good you should never need support. When was the last time you needed to call anybody to help you with Firefox or Open Office? These products just work and are intuitive enough that you should never need to call IBM for support.
This is total bull. Applications like Eclipse are sophisticated development frameworks. You can build services like hand holding, custom plugins,modifications, implement feature requests etc. The more the application does the more the services around it are
Firefox and openoffice both have a large amount of services around it. Mozilla Corporate, Moz dev etc for Mozilla and firefox. IBM. Sun etc for openoffice and startoffice.
When I worked for IBM we went on site and trained customers in Java. Assisted in code migrations from legacy systems to newer systems on multiple platforms. For example, we assisted in migrating cobal based green screen system to a java web based system. Yes we used majority of IBM tools, but we also trained the companies developers so they could maintain their code.
Jim
They shell software based on Eclipse. And Borland also want to create Eclipse based commercial development environment. It is not a bad thing, but IBM and other supporters are not saints, they are profit-centric companies, similar to Microsoft. If you develop a java application with Eclipse sooner or later you will buy a webphere or any other java-based server application. And when you buy this server it will more expensive then windows and the visual studio.
“The donation is meant to provide an architecture and tools to seed an ecosystem in which software practitioners, technology vendors, universities, researchers and others can continually communicate, publish and reuse best practices,” it added. ® (El Reg)
and is Linus going to move to RUP?
We have to use ClearCase, ClearQuest and XDE Tester around here and they’re horrible. Just horrible. I can’t imagine how anything from Rational going into Eclipse could end up being a good thing.
I’m jumping for joy at news of the release, but I’d jump even higher if IBM would release code to its mvfs kernel module so that Rational ClearCase would work with our development platform (currently Fedora Core 4). It’s sad that I have to switch temporarily to a Windows machine just to download a snapshot or to update the repository.
Isn’t it kind of interesting all the news we hear lately about code being committed to open source? Sure, every month code gets committed by commercial organizations, even if we don’t hear about it. But there’s no doubt that as we get closer to the eve of Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, competing vendors are commiting more than ever code into open source. I cannot wait for next year when Windows Vista comes out. I’m sure we are going to see even more of this.
And althogh this is surely great, the problem is that simply committing any code is not good enough. The code needs to be easy to use (at least to some extent), well documented and be able to solve a real problem for it to have any impact. By simply providing code, it does not change anything. Every piece of code that moves into the open source domain, regardless of the source, will require a finite amount of time and energy for it to have any impact. The more difficult it is to implement it, for whatever reason, the less the chance that it will make any difference regardless how good it is at the end of it all.
Given how easy and cost effective it is to put together a simple website with documentation and examples describing how to use the given piece of code being committed to open source, it makes a huge difference when this is done, as oppose to simply dumping it on an ftp server and hoping for the best…
-ajam
“Isn’t it kind of interesting all the news we hear lately about code being committed to open source? Sure, every month code gets committed by commercial organizations, even if we don’t hear about it. But there’s no doubt that as we get closer to the eve of Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, competing vendors are commiting more than ever code into open source. I cannot wait for next year when Windows Vista comes out. I’m sure we are going to see even more of this.
And althogh this is surely great, the problem is that simply committing any code is not good enough. The code needs to be easy to use (at least to some extent), well documented and be able to solve a real problem for it to have any impact. By simply providing code, it does not change anything. Every piece of code that moves into the open source domain, regardless of the source, will require a finite amount of time and energy for it to have any impact. The more difficult it is to implement it, for whatever reason, the less the chance that it will make any difference regardless how good it is at the end of it all.
Given how easy and cost effective it is to put together a simple website with documentation and examples describing how to use the given piece of code being committed to open source, it makes a huge difference when this is done, as oppose to simply dumping it on an ftp server and hoping for the best…
-ajam”
One of the qualities that distinguishes good programmers from poor programmers is their ability to understand other people’s code. I thought open source programmers were the elite!
“I thought open source programmers were the elite!”
I’m not sure if open source programmers are elite. I actually don’t even know what elite really means anymore. If I see one, I’ll ask.
In overall, I have to say you made a great, intelligent point here. Companies should dump irrelevant, undocumented code onto unknown, not very accessible servers, so that (so-called elite) programmers will spend their time (which certainly has no value) figuring out every possible feature of a badly designed/implemented piece code for the sake of it. Yep, sounds like a plan to me!
“Given how easy and cost effective it is to put together a simple website with documentation and examples describing how to use the given piece of code being committed to open source, it makes a huge difference when this is done, as oppose to simply dumping it on an ftp server and hoping for the best…”
IBM has already produced massive volumes of documentation on RUP, amongst which are tutorials on how to leverage RUP using Eclipse.:
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/products/rup
As for the code itself, IBM has very strict guidelines concerning documentation, and I expect that IBM employees will be among the biggest contributors to the newly open-sourced code.
“IBM wants Eclipse to be a huge success because they make money from it. No, not directly, but once companies become “IBM shops” via Eclipse, they are much more likely to buy the Eclipse add on Websphere.”
When a company donates code to the community, it either does so because it has no commericial interest in continuing development, or they want to spur adoption of the technology for various reasons. This is an instance of the latter case, and the biggest reason is not to sell Websphere, it’s to sell services and support for implementing RUP.
“IBM has always been a services based company. They want Eclipse to be successfull so they can sell services that revolve around Eclipse.”
Actually, not too long ago IBM was primarily a hardware based company. They want Eclipse to be successful because otherwise Sun and Microsoft own the market for software development tools and services.
“IBM is only “donating” these things in an attempt to actually get people to use Eclipse, which they seem to have some self interest in.”
In case you didn’t know, IBM founded and endowed the Eclipse Foundation. In a sense, they are donating to their own project.
“If IBM really wanted to help the “OSS cause” they would open up everything they currently have that competes with their own OSS offerings, as well as other things they have.”
IBM, like most mature technology companies, views OSS has a valuable tool to promote open standards. It is outrageous to suggest that companies that develop and productize propietary software are enemies of OSS. For example, Linux runs on all of IBM’s hardware platforms, and where support is lacking, they are actively working to improve this (dynamic LPARs for Linux on POWER is a good example). Linux will be the only OS that IBM supports on the Cell processor. IBM is committed to supporting Firefox and OpenDocument from top to bottom, including its revolutionary WorkPlace suite, a collaborative productivity environment for Linux.
There are some software assets that I believe IBM should open source, particularly some from IBM Research. However, the majority of IBMs software products are completely unsuitable for open sourcing. Nobody is interested in hacking Lotus Notes, and very few people would be able to figure out how to build AIX from source.
You might think that IBM is committed to OSS, but in reality, this is not a viable business model for IBM. This is a company that supports Java, Xeon, Oracle, and Windows Server. All of these are flagship products of IBM’s primary competitors. Why? Because IBM does what businesses use, not just what they want them to use.
IBM supports Linux because businesses want Linux. They made a huge committment to Linux to make sure that they could support Linux horizontally across the board. IBM is not a vertical Linux vendor or distributor (although they support Linux solutions), and they never will be. They don’t develop technologies that purposefully hinder OSS or Linux. They even open sourced JFS, primarily to ensure that Linux users could read and write to JFS/JFS2 volumes on AIX servers.
In short, what else do you want from IBM in terms of supporting OSS? They’re already being sued for contributing to Linux…