IBM Jazz Edges Closer To Open Source

hhavensteincw writes "IBM is molding its Jazz technology, which helps software development teams collaborate, in the image of its popular Eclipse open source community. IBM said that today's move to open access to its Jazz.net portal to anyone to peruse its code, access bug lists, etc. puts it on the path to completely open-source the Jazz technology."

Wake me up...

[Anonymous Coward]

...when Jazz vertices and faces are also close to Open Source.

Not much information in article... see videos

[compumike]

I love when I can actually RTFA and still have no idea what the product is. So I found these videos of Jazz [jazz.net] which should be helpful. But this is one of those "platform" things where they aren't actually selling anything... But my interpretation is that they're essentially trying to put together a code repository (ala Subversion) with Bugtraq with mailing list with instant message.

--
Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation. [nerdkits.com]

Re:

[Compuser]

So is it like a DIY Sourceforge kit?

Re:Not much information in article... see videos

[Anonymous Coward]

Somewhat, but not quite. This isn't them specifically growing out of the sourceforge.net/open source community, I think this is them trying to go for the "Behind The Firewall" versions of Sourceforge.

Rational's been getting its ass kicked by SourceForge Enterprise Edition and Collabnet Enterprise Edition (in addition to JIRA and GForge) for a while now. While the two big players, SourceForge Enterprise Edition (used to be owned by VA, er, SourceForge.com) and CollabNet Enterprise Edition were bringing the Rational and Star Offices to SFEE and CEE, I think IBM woke up and realized that there are a lot of new things.

CollabNet bought SourceForge Enterprise Edition in April, and it seems like that company is going to go down in flames. If you add on top of SFEE and CEE, they have some Virtualization software that isn't quite hotel management software, and some reporting software that you'd be better off using Jasper or Crystal reports for. Yes, there are eclipse plugins for SFEE and CEE, but, this is taking it completely a step further -- bringing the product lifecycle inside of the IDE, from conceptualization to User stories to coding to defect tracking and releasing software. It also looks like IBM's solved the ability to cluster, something CEE and SFEE haven't been able to do.

It looks promising, to say the least.

Re:

[RuBLed]

I miss the "love the ponies" troll.. please return.. we are sorry little pony...

Re:What's with all the trolls lately?

[bar-agent]

OMG PONIES!!!

Re:

[PinkPanther]

I like turtles [google.com]!

whatcouldpossiblygoright

[Pennidren]

9 out of 10 taggers agree, /. articles are simply omens of our impending doom

I guess no news really is good news to most of us?

Re:

[Pennidren]

nice, i was modded flamebait, but notice that the whatcouldpossiblygowrong tag has subsequently been removed

Did you know....

[Creepy Crawler]

That the word "Jazz" comes from creole sexual slang "come jazz me up".

It is also past tense form of "jizz".

How times change...

Re:

[Profane MuthaFucka]

That's such an awesome coincidence because if there's anybody that loves jizz more than Pudge, it would be me.

Re:

[Arnonymous Coward]

I thought this was a troll to, until I did a quick search and found out they were correct.

'Jazz' is not a bad word now, but almost certainly is of extremely low origin, referring to copulation before it was applied to music, dancing, and nonsense (i.e., all that Jazz). The vulgar word was in general currency in dance halls thirty years or more ago" (Clay Smith, Etude 9/24). "According to Raven I. McDavid Sr. of Greenville, S.C., the 1919 announcement of the first 'Jazz band' to play in Columbia, where he wa

What is Jazz

[MrCopilot]

Everyone is asking what it is. When did we get so lazy?

What is Jazz?

Developing software in a team is much like playing an instrument in a band. Both require a balance of collaboration and virtuosity. Jazz defines a vision for the way products can integrate to support this kind of collaborative work, and a technology platform to deliver on this vision.

Jazz is an IBM Rational project to build a scalable, extensible team collaboration platform for integrating work across the phases of the development lifecycle. We believe Jazz will help teams build software more effectively while making the software development activity more productive and enjoyable.

Jazz is a technology platform, not a product. Product offerings that are built on the Jazz platform will be able to leverage a rich set of capabilities for team-based software development and delivery. Rational Team Concert Express will be the first of a planned family of Rational Team Concert offerings built on Jazz technology.

http://jazz.net/pub/index.jsp [jazz.net]

Most of us haven't heard of it because it has been in a closed private pilot program, now open to all of us.

Re:What is Jazz

[Seumas]

This is what I love about Slashdot.

People are lazy and don't read the article (hey, this is Slashdot - that's how it has always been).

People are not too lazy to post "what the fuck is this about?" even though they don't read it.

Other people complain about people not reading the article.

Those same people then copy and paste or explain what it is, while complaining that people are too lazy to read the article.

Then, OTHER people mod-up the people who are complaining about and enabling the lazy people to continue being more lazy by posting the info directly in a post for them.

That's why this is home. :)

Re:

[cyphercell]

That's why this is home. :)

Yes, it's the fine art of the executive summary, but you aren't supposed to tell anyone.

Re:

[MrCopilot]

Actually, I agree that TFA was uninformative.

I was lamenting the laziness of people not finding out more information. Instead kvetching about it. Takes several more clicks than a search.

Welcome Home Friend.

Re:

[mweather]

And then there's Maude!

Re:

[clacke]

So ... what is it then?

Re:

[eggnoglatte]

Well I read that, but what the heck does it MEAN?

"Jazz is a technology platform, not a product"

Wow. What insight. This should get the Pulizer for "best piece in managerspeak".

Re:

[famebait]

Everyone is asking what it is. When did we get so lazy?

Looooong ago. This led to a lot of people missing out on really
interesting infoprmation. But then Slashdot was invented, to
help us lazy humans and make it easier to handle the flow
of information, by giving us hints about which current articles
might be interesting to us, in a single easy-to-scan place, and
get this, _before_ we read them.
BRILLIANT!

Some posters though, fail to grasp this fundamental point of
slashdot in its entirety. What they think it's fo

Re:

[CarpetShark]

Most of us haven't heard of it because it has been in a closed private pilot program

Microsoft tried that too, but they even information about their top-secret cyborg chair-chucker program leaked out ;)

Re:

[PinkPanther]

The difference is that Microsoft is a marketing firm that employs some programmers. ;-)

Re:

[kryten]

Perhaps they could bring out a monthly magazine to help explain it all and keep us up to date with the process.
A "Jazz Mag" developers could read when they had a few quiet moments alone.

Re:

[epine]

Most of us haven't heard of it because it has been in a closed private pilot program, now open to all of us.

I was hoping that most of us hadn't heard of this because we were sensibly protecting our brain cells from those paragraphs of bafflegab that constitute IBM's parting of the polyester curtain on their newest 1958 Buick with the inimitable "Fashion-Aire Dynastar grille".

Speaking of blurry unveilings in the era of monochromatic one-piece swimwear, what's the least amount of cling wrap required to dress a trade-show bunny so as not to get her arrested?

Re:

[SiggyTheViking]

If you have to ask, you'll never know.

Wrong

[ThirdPrize]

Jazz is the sound of a blues quartet being pushed down the stairs.

Re:

[richieb]

... a scalable, extensible team collaboration platform for integrating work across the phases of the development lifecycle.

I read the article. I still don't know what the hell it is...

Re:

[eison]

It's not lazy - it's just that the explanation doesn't explain. That description could describe everything from Sharepoint to Wikipedia to SourceForge to kitchen refrigerator magnets, and as such it doesn't actually tell me anything useful, like wtf is Jazz?

Wall street is waking up

[britneys 9th husband]

It's good to see that Wall Street is starting to take notice of the value of open source. IBM's stock was up over 5 points Monday [yahoo.com] on this latest news of their ever-increasing commitment to open source software rather than the closed source models of the 20th century.

Re:Wall street is waking up

[Benjamin T Miller]

No, IBM's stock went up 5 points on Monday because their expected earnings per share were $2.80, 20 cents higher than the predictions of analysts. It has absolutely nothing to do with this "latest news of their ever-increasing commitment to open source software." While you and I might care about businesses and open source, Wall Street has exactly one thing in mind: profit, and higher than expected profit caused their stock to go up.

Re:

[Alphager]

And IBM succeded in getting the Cognos-owners to accept the buyout.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

No. It's because I farted 17.5 times that day.

Nobody really knows why any stock goes up or down. People make up stories that seem to explain the reason, but they are nothing more than speculation.

For example the earnings report and buyout news may have triggered a small rise, which lead to a feeding frenzy which lead to programmed selling which damped the increase from the frenzy. Or it may be related to my propensity to break wind.

To say that certain factors may have lead to an increase in price is reas

Re:

[nacturation]

Surely you're trolling. Their latest gain was because they made a lot of money and the market responded. If IBM sent out a press release saying they're freely handing out source code to all their software, I bet their stock would tank.
 

Jazz being tested at U of Arizona CS/CE

[shoegoo]

I recently received an email from the Computer Science advisor at the University of Arizona regarding an independent study class where this software is being tested. Here is the email:

ECE/C SC 399/399H/499/499H

Jan 14, 2008 - Feb 15, 2008

24-Hour Knowledge Factory in Software Development Research Experiment

Course Summary:

The purpose of this research experiment is to collect data on how effective the 24-Hour Knowledge Factory process is when used with software development, and collect feedback from students on their interactions with the process. Students taking this course would complete a CS C 335-style project during the first four weeks of the Spring 2008 semester. Students would participate in one of two ways:

Case 1: Students would be part of a 3-person team completing the project using the simulated 24-Hour Knowledge Factory process. This would require students to select 2 days per week (3 days apart) to complete approximately 4 hours of project work. Each team member would then save their files at the end of the day and the next student would continue working on the next day. All project communication must be done through the message board prototype provided. All development will be completed using Jazz, a set of collaborative tools built on top of eclipse, which will be available on select machines in GS 228.

Case 2: Students would be a control group, each student working independently. In order to mimic the situations of the 24-Hour Knowledge Factory groups, students would still only perform 8 hours of project work per week, but this time could be on any two days that the student chooses, (in 4 hour increments each day). There will be a much fewer number of openings for this situation, no more than the number of participating complete groups.

Course Requirements:

Each student will be required to attend an orientation session on the Monday prior to classes starting. Also, each student will need to complete daily progress reports twice a week and a weekly summary report each week. Students must also commit to work 2 days per week for 4 hours (or a more flexible 8 hours per week schedule for case 2) on days that can be negotiated before course enrollment.

Grades will be based on timely and thorough completion of progress reports and not on project progress. Instead, the team from case 1 and the student from case 2 that completes the most assigned tasks or creates the best product will be awarded gift certificates to a local restaurant in the amount of $20 per person.

Prerequisites:

Students must have completed C SC 227 (or equivalent Java programming courses).

It is preferred that students have completed C SC 335 or ECE 373 (or equivalent Java programming courses, specifically with experience in Java Swing development).

Note: Some students without the second requirement may be selected to participate on teams with students that do meet that requirement. At most one student not meeting this requirement will be placed on a team.

My brother has inquired about the details of this expirement as he may be interested in participating. The experiment administrator told him that the work must be completed on the selected computers in the CS labs as those boxes would be the only place the software is available.

The only thing I could think of...

[MadJo]

The only thing I could think of when I read this article, was: "IBM is on the jazz again."

what Jazz is about

[Anonymous Coward]

I saw a demo once. In a nutshell, Jazz is to team performance what Eclipse is to personal performance, it is a platform for collaboration tools. I think it started as an internal project of eclipse developers to better support the Eclipse development process. You can define and enforce your software process and good coding practices. A software process can be a heavyweight pocess a la RUP or a lightweight like XP or any custom process like the Eclipse Process. There are development process building blocks like plans, tasks, roles, versions, (nightly) builds, milestones, releases, bugs, etc.. It supports distributed (multi site) development. It has an embededd chat capablity that is process aware (e.g. drag and drop of references to bug reports, builds and code deltas). There is also a "dashboard" web application with project status screens and bug tracking.

Re:

[Kaptain Kruton]

In a nutshell, Jazz is to team performance what Eclipse is to personal performance...

In other words, it is cool in theory, but is actually far more trouble than its worth.

Re:

[JustPutt2]

Forgive me, if I am wrong. IMHO was the first intelligent posting on this article.

Released on...

[aproposofwhat]

What I want to know is...

is IBM Jazz released on the Big Blue Note label?

Well, guess what...

[JamesP]

Given the tripe that "Rational" products are, this makes my curiosity about this ZERO.

There are several good collaboration tools out there, none made by "Rational"

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Jazz isn't made by the Rational people. It's made by many of the same people responsible for Eclipse [eclipse.org]. I used to work with some of them, and I've seen bits and pieces of Jazz as it was under early development.

It looks very promising, especially for large organizations that currently cobble together a suite of collaborative tools by hand. The main promise of it is integration between all those different tools, which will be tighter and smoother than you can get when you use separate tools from separate ven

That sucks

[kaiwai]

It's GPL; I'm going to create my own BSDL version called "Free Jazz" - beautiful chaos allowing free improvisation :)

Not GPL. It's CPL.

[ShinmaWa]

It's GPL

I realize you were setting up a joke, but in reality its far more likely it will be CPL/EPL [wikipedia.org], not GPL. Don't forget IBM's motivations here. They may be opening the Jazz platform, but IBM will be selling products built on top of Jazz platform they created -- just like IBM sells a bazillion products built on top of the Eclipse platform they created (technically, Jazz is built on top of Eclipse too).

Warning: TOS Bomb!

[Anonymous Coward]

I just wanted to sign up, but then I read the Terms of Usage, and there's quite a hitch: IBM can do anything with your source code - even use it in closed source products or sell it to somebody else

Quote, with own emphasis:

Contributory Licenses

By sending IBM or this Web site (including but not limited to by uploading, submitting or otherwise making available or contributing to IBM or this Web site) any information or material, you grant IBM an unrestricted, worldwide, non-exclusive, irrevocable, perp