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"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," Sabbah also said. "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."

The donation announced today is designed to advance 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.

IBM also announced that is joined in this open source project by a consortium of software industry leaders, including Capgemini, BearingPoint, Covansys, Jaczone, Number Six Software, Ivar Jacobson International, Armstrong Process Group and Ambysoft, as well as Unisys, NTT Comware, Sogeti and Wind River.

IBM's proposal is expected to be received positively by the open-source community. Bill Dudney, Editor-in-Chief of SYS-CON's Eclipse Developer's Journal and Vice President/Practice Leader at open-source company Virtuas, said "This is great news for the Eclipse community, but it's especially welcome for the IT development community. With the initial grant of the essence of the Rational Unified Process (RUP) as well as the tools necessary to extend and elaborate on this foundation, IBM has given us great starting point to build great processes and best practices repositories."

Dudney added, "In addition to providing a starting point in the RUP donation this contribution also includes tools to help
communities form and collaborate to build their own processes and best practice repositories. With this foundation the ‘process’ communities (agile, XP, etc) will have a great tool set to collaborate and elaborate their processes together. The really great thing is the open approach this community, being part of Eclipse, will foster."

Mark Hinkle, Editor-in-Chief of SYS-CON's LinuxWorld Magazine and VP/Business Development for open-source company Win4Lin, said "Open sourcing of commercial software is a fascinating trend where software vendors are giving away intellectual property that they once guarded with the utmost secrecy. They are trading the protection of confidentiality for the benefits of collaboration and wider mindshare for their products and ideas. The most successful examples of open sourcing of technologies are the ones were a community develops around the donated code like we have seen with the Mozilla Foundation's Firefox. I suspect IBM is savvy enough to help foster such a community around their RUP release."

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