InfoWorld: Did Rational have anything that competed with Eclipse?
Booch: No. In fact, in the days prior to the acquisition, we were actually members of eclipse.org, we had a board position.
We had to deal with Visual Studio, we had to deal with the other IDEs, and we viewed Eclipse as a great way to reduce or eliminate
the fragmentation in the marketplace. So we really bought into the Eclipse notion because it simplified life for us, in terms
of IDE platforms. Eclipse is cool, I use it. It's wickedly cool.
InfoWorld: Is Rational concerned that somebody is going to do free, open source versions of what you’re doing?
Booch: Actually we know they are, and we welcome it. There are open source versions of [some of our] tools, of our modeling
tools, it's happening and it's inevitable. There will be a day that you’ll see open source middleware, and what that means
for Rational in particular, IBM at large, is the inevitable commoditization of the software stack. We've seen things like
Argo/UML. CVS is a good example as well, on the configuration management side. These things exist and they're inevitable for
us and we see them, but that's actually a good thing for our customers because it forces us to keep innovating and add value
to that stack.
InfoWorld: When do you get to a point where everyone gets all the software they need through open source?
Booch: I don't think that will ever happen. The IDE has been commoditized, we have Eclipse. The basic drawing of UML -- that
will be commoditized over time. But the ability to tie those things to particular stacks, to tie them to WebSphere, to tie
them to Tivoli, to tie them to the rest of the LAMP stuff, to move into particular verticals and deal with reasonable patterns
that we can then drive automation to, the open source community doesn't necessarily have the right business model to pursue
some of those things. Now, that being said, you can see things like RosettaNet. In the automotive marketplace, there's Autosar,
and we welcome those. Autosar is a good example of an open source framework, an architectural framework for the automotive
industry. And we think those things are great, because they represent the players in that marketplace getting together and
saying, "We're not going to wage war anymore, we're going to choose some architectural standards so we can simplify the market
and now we'll do plug-and-play kinds of things." Because innovation doesn't happen on the architectural side, it happens on
how you put those pieces together. Where can IBM and Rational continue to innovate? We can continue to drive our tooling
so we support those open frameworks, and we'll let the open source community deal with the domain-specific things. We'll deal
with the automation along the way.
InfoWorld: What is your take on unifying business processes and software development?
Booch: [There] are some companies where I can go in and I just smell the difference, where I talk to the developers and to
the CIO and the CEO, and there's this utter disconnect. The CEO view of software is it's that crappy stuff here that just
costs me money. Whereas there are other organizations, notably in the telcos [where] we saw it first and the defense organizations
where we probably saw it next, where they really get the notion that software is a competitive advantage for them. In those
organizations that really get it, that means that their business processes both drive and are driven by their software developers
and that's created this need for automation of getting those two groups to talk together with one another, which was the basis
of many of the tools you saw there. [The issue is] how do you get an organization that really gets the notion of software
so that we can provide better automation to its senior executives.
InfoWorld: What is your take on blogging and where that's going?
Booch: Ninety percent of everything is crap, so there are several million bloggers in this world and there's a lot of really
interesting stuff that social scientists years from now will look at it and say, "Wow, we had a mixed-up generation." But
on the other hand, there are some real gems, and I follow a few blogs, because in these places it's a great way to see what's
happening. I follow James Gosling's blog, I follow Wil Wheaton's blog. Alan Brown has a good blog. I was one of the first
bloggers for IBM, and I'll be honest in saying it just utterly amazes me that I'm publishing direct to the IBM site and there
are no lawyers between my fingers and the public world.
InfoWorld: Does that make the lawyers nervous?
Booch: Oh, I hope so. But I think it's great because it indicates that IBM recognizes that if they were to [impede] us it
would totally destroy the value proposition of blogs.
InfoWorld: What do you see happening with blog technology?
Booch: To be honest, I hated the blogging tools out there, so I wrote my own. So for me, it hasn’t quite stabilized to the
point where I like it yet.
InfoWorld: Is Rational going to do any blogging tools?
Booch: No. It's not really a development issue for us. There’s no value added for Rational. There are a lot of people out
there doing blogging things more so than us. Now, that being said, it is an element that we view relevant to collaborative
development. Wikis, blogs, discussion groups, Web meetings -- these are all part of the ecosystem of collaboration.
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