IBM's Jazz project invites outsiders to jam

IBM likes open source so much, it's adopting the out-in-the-open process for its own product development--to a point.

As part of its Jazz project, the computing giant is expected to announce Monday at its Rational Software Development Conference in Orlando, Fla., plans to use an open-source style process during the building of its forthcoming collaborative development product.

IBM customers and partners will be able to log on to the Jazz.net Web site, where IBM will host the code and related documentation.

"We want to do it in an open and transparent way so that customers can get access to the (product) requirements and help us shape it," said Scott Hebner, vice president of marketing and strategy at IBM Rational.

While the project will initially be limited to IBM customers and partners, the company intends to open up the process more over time, Hebner said. This sort of open-source methodology is already used in projects like the Apache Foundation and at the Java Community Process where Sun Microsystems engineers release regular "builds" of Java software under development.

The collaborative development product at IBM will be based on its Jazz platform, Eclipse-based server and client software designed to make teams of developers be more productive.

Also on Monday, IBM plans to release a beta version of IBM Team Concert, a commercial product based on the Jazz platform. It is aimed at allowing different members of a geographically spread-out development team to share information, such as application requirements and defects, to give them good "visibility" into the application development process, Hebner said.

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With the 760, though, the days of planning routes on your computer and then uploading the necessary maps to your GPS's http://www.highspeedsat.com/roadmate760.htm paltry memory are gone. We think this is a good thing, but we do wish the 760 shipped with an application that allowed users to upload contacts from their Outlook or PC-based address book to the unit's address book. Granted, the 760 does have an IR port for beaming contacts from a PDA or Smart Phone, but further integration with a PC in this one area would be nice.