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IBM has announced plans to donate key intellectual assets to the open source community, "in an effort to help companies and software practitioners adopt and share best practices for software development," according to the company. The proposal involves a subset of the IBM Rational Unified Process (RUP), and will be taken under consideration by the Eclipse Foundation.

IBM Rational methods manager and spokesperson Per Kroll, in an exclusive interview with SYS-CON Media, said that developers, whether working in the open-source environment known as LAMP or in other environments, will receive multiple benefits from IBM's announcement.

RUP is a software process platform that has guided some 500,000 developers around the world in projects ranging from small-scale product development to large industrial-strength systems, according to IBM. It comprises what IBM says is "a vast collection of methods and best practices for promoting quality and efficiency throughout software development projects."

IBM's donation will also provide a foundation architecture and Web-based tools for the industry to engineer, collaborate on, share and reuse software development best practices, according to Kroll.

"A lack of standards in core development activities such as requirements setting, analysis and design, testing and project management has increased time and overhead as organizations continually reproduce the myriad processes, plans and compliance documents that are fundamental to software development. Best practices often remain siloed within an individual team or company," according to an official announcement that was confirmed by remarks Kroll also made.

"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 (pictured), General Manager, IBM Rational Software. "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.

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