IBM made another ‘great’ OSS donation
Today I read on Slashdot that IBM donates ‘parts of RUP’ to the open source community. With the open source community IBM means The Eclipse Project.
I also read the press release but for me it is not very clear what IBM actually donates. I know vaguely what RUP (Rational Unified Process) is, but I wonder how one can donate a development process to the open source community. What I understand of the comments on the Slashdot post, it means some tools which may be used with RUP are added to Eclipse.
For me it is another useless donation from IBM. While I think IBM certainly does some good things for open source projects, their recent ‘donations’ are pretty useless. For me these actions are more inspired by the marketing department so that they can continue to promote IBM as an ‘open source company’, but it is a big bubble of air if you ask me. Sun Microsystems does more or less the same, but I think their contributions are more usefull than the IBM contributions (and I consider Sun more as an open source company than IBM, but ofcourse that is a personal opinion and I’m sure many people disagree on this).
Apart from the donation, I also doubt if one can consider the Eclipse Project as a real open source project. While the source is available to anyone who want to have it, donate code is pretty hard, because (as far as I know) the company you work for has to be a member of the Eclipse Foundation in order to get your code contribution accepted by project.
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