IBM Eye

Frank Schophuizen poses (and answers) a question:

Is software development a commodity ?

IBM goes for open source. At first I could not believe that a company like IBM would ever consider giving away anything to anyone. But with Eclipse they do and by donating a subset of the Rational Unified Process they are doing it again. Why?

It’s like fishing. They throw out the bait to catch the big fish.

(read his whole post for an explanation).

It’s a tad cynical, but I’d suggest not entirely inaccrurate analysis of IBM’s strategy in this area. Why would any company give something away for free ? To foster adoption of their technology of course.

I certainly don’t think it’s a malicious strategy - indeed, the consumers of the technology are those who win. What is the most popular development platform available today ? Eclipse! Why ? A) it’s good, B) it’s free !!

Just because something is free, doesn’t make it (necessarily) good, but something that is good and free, is going to do very well.

It’s not as if IBM is the only software vendor selling Java based technology. Anyone can leverage Eclipse’s development tools for deployment on any Java based platform. So IBM certainly isn’t locking people into a proprietary platform.

The key selling point for IBM’s own development tools (Rational), is the value-add they offer above and beyond the base eclipse platform. And if most of your developers already know and love Eclipse, it’s a much easier sell to migrate them up to IBM’s toolset that is based on that platform.

Summary: I think giving software away is a strategy that is great for the wider community - and I expect to see IBM continue along this path for the benefit of everyone (especially IBM).