Comments on: From the Eclipse Platform to the IBM Rational Jazz Platform

By: Adrian Cho

Adrian Cho — Thu, 07 May 2009 04:00:20 +0000

Great article Ferdy. A couple of details you may want to know on the licensing front. You’re right that the Jazz Foundation and RTC are not made available under an open source license. We’re using many of the open source practices learned from Eclipse to develop the software in an open and transparent manner but it’s very much a commercial offering when it comes to the licensing. That said:

We make all the source code for RTC available with each build. You can modify this for your own internal use but you cannot redistribute it.

We offer free RTC licenses for academic researchers, educators and open source projects (https://jazz.net/community/academic/).

By: Frank Gerhardt

Frank Gerhardt — Tue, 05 May 2009 15:48:26 +0000

> How much of you have heard about Jazz? How much of you have experimented with it? Which is your (technological) opinion?

I think it’s great. The design can be taken as a blueprint for mulit-user RCP applications. I would prefer RAP for the web UI but RAP was not available at that time they started it.

> Must IBM open source the Jazz platform? Do you think it will be interesting and wide adopted? Why?

Yes, or adoption will be minimal outside of IBM. Tool vendors and ISV will not buy into it otherwise. To apapt their tools/software they will rather put a Jazz isolation layer around their code. Given that the Jazz team must be quite busy with developing the product, there might just not be enough time available for evangelizing the community. For Eclipse, community building was a project in itself, consuming quite a bit of frequent flyer miles. I hope will will see similar efforts for Jazz. What will not help is IBM sales people doing road shows. That does not “sell” the platform to developers and architects. I guess Erich Gamma needs to do that again.

But I can’t answer *why* IBM should open-source the platform. They must have a goal – I don’t see one. A killer app needs to kill something. Eclipse killed all the other Java IDEs and only let VisualStudio co-exist. What thing should Jazz or RTC kill? It’s not an established market, unlike the Java IDEs. It’s a new market and you win by being the first and best since there are not others to kill. Sorry about using the k-word so often.

My background is RCP development. I would REALLY welcome the Jazz platform for developing multi-user business applications. I have done a lot of custom inhouse special user management, persistence, remoting, web services etc. I just don’t see why IBM would give me that present for free. Please!

Today you can’t use the Jazz platform at all for custom development. That’s the worst of all. Or you make your users buy RTC for 50k+client licences and bundle your application inside of that… Obviously not a option. Even a commercial licence would make sense, if the platform gives me a productivity boost. On the other hand, many productivity booster like Spring can’t be sold – they must be open-source for a community to adopt them.

By: Theju Mudda

Theju Mudda — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 09:49:27 +0000

Thanks for the article! It gives a nice overview on Jazz platform and how it is different from Eclipse.

By: Ferdy

Ferdy — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 00:03:15 +0000

Scott, thanks for dropping by. It's true that I've had some access to your team, but all the information I gathered for this post is available through the jazz.net wiki, or at Bill's blog, or at Simon's blog, or on twitter, or on InfoQ, ... So, yes, ALL credit goes to the open-ness of the project. I've expressed my opinion several times. I want more Rational projects using the transparent development process.

By: Scott Rich

Scott Rich — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 15:28:24 +0000

I’d say you’ve got it, Ferdy. I know you’ve had more access to the Jazz team than the average person, but I hope some credit goes to the open-ness of the project, and that you’re not alone in understanding the Jazz vision.