IBM takes Rational approach to open source

IBM is to donate 3,000 lines of code to the Eclipse Foundation

IBM has announced plans to donate large parts of its Rational technology code to the open source community, in a move which it says will help companies and software practitioners adopt and share best practice for software development.

Big Blue will donate the code to the Eclipse Foundation, an open source community that provides a free Java-based platform to ease program development.

The donation consists of 3,000 lines of code developed over 20 years, as well as 15 per cent of the Rational Unified Process (RUP) platform that allows organisations to tie business and development units together.

IBM is donating the meta model for describing development processes, and the tooling for customising and creating processes, said Roger Oberg, vice president at IBM's Rational Group.

The proposal will go to the Eclipse Foundation which will review, accept or modify it, and in all likelihood release an Eclipse process framework sometime next year.

Some see this as effectively opening up 'RUP lite', a move that could help to stimulate sales of the core product.

RUP consists of web-based content that documents and provides terminology for best practices, workflows and artefacts involved in iterative development.