IBM Donates Software Development IP

IBM announced plans on Wednesday to make a donation of intellectual property that it hopes would help companies adopt and share the best practices for software development. The donation, which consists of some 300,000 lines of code, is a portion of the IBM Rational Unified Process (RUP).

"We think we will change the software process industry," IBM's manager of methods Per Kroll told BetaNews in an interview. "We think this would solve a lot of problems."

By streamlining ways to collaborate on development, IBM says software would be able to be completed cheaper, faster and with less bugs. According to research by Gartner, half of all software projects run over their budgets, 9 out of every 10 are completed late, and 3 out of 10 are cancelled altogether.

Furthermore, 15 to 20 percent of software defects reach end users, costing the economy an estimated $60 billion per year, according to the Standish Group.

With development, "the problem is the knowledge doesn't reach the project," Kroll said.

The donation would be given to the Eclipse Foundation, an open source group created by IBM through a software donation in 2001 that works on a Java-based platform to assist in software development.

It would take approximately one to two months for the group to vote to accept the donation, followed by another six to nine month period before the first version of the platform is developed.

But why open source? IBM has become increasingly involved in the community in recent months, and now takes part in over 150 open source projects. According to Kroll, there's a reason for it.

"As soon as a technology is open sourced, there is nearly immediate innovation," Kroll explained. "We don't think of it as free per se, we think of it as an invitation to innovate. We want to drive innovation around a core set of best practices."

Upon revealing the details of the plan to its partners, several companies expressed interest in helping to develop the platform "This is not an IBM initiative," Kroll said. "This is an industry initiative."