Booch: There's no doubt that that stack is great for certain kinds of domains and IBM will never replace that with WebSphere, because there's a threshold below [for] which just those open source [offerings] are quite sufficient. The threshold [is in] terms of performance and complexity. Many organizations that [use] the LAMP stack realize as they grow their architecture doesn't necessarily grow with them. In fact, it's curious to look at many of the dot-com survivors and just map out the number of seismic architectural changes they have done. They've gone from just PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) scripts and MySQL in the background to [moving to] WebSphere for performance and complexity reasons.
InfoWorld: How do you know when you have to move to something that's larger than LAMP?
Booch: Great question. LAMP's kind of the gateway drug. That’s probably a bad sound bite, but you know what I mean by it. And you realize you're into problems at the point in time where the resilience to change becomes so difficult. So, and in other words, you built up something that you're spending so much more time just patching and just sort of appending onto it to try to make it faster or do whatever you need to do. If it's unable to absorb change rapidly enough to meet the rapid changes of the marketplace, then you know you're running into problems. And generally it requires that one do somewhat of a seismic re-architecting.
InfoWorld: How does Eclipse not get included in the LAMP stack?
Booch: I think it's because it's an orthogonal thing; the LAMP stuff is the run time and the Eclipse side of it is currently the development timepieces of it.
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?
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