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IBM Buys Rational Software
An anonymous reader writes "Rational Software is going to be taken over by IBM. More info on Rational's website. RIP Rational. This is what rational is sending it's customers:
To our valued customers:
We are delighted to tell you that IBM and Rational Software have announced a definitive agreement for IBM to purchase Rational. This is a very exciting time for both companies and builds on the extensive business relationship IBM and Rational have had for over 20 years. Most importantly, it will provide significant benefits to you." Other readers submit links to the story in InformationWeek and the Mercury News.
After record losses this past quarter and a stock plunge from 70 dollars to 4 in the past year, Rational was on its way out. I'm not sure how much of Rational IBM is really planning on keeping around or whether they simply bought them for their software they wanted and planned on burying the rest of the company, but here's hoping they don't all get canned. I've been using ClearCase on Solaris for years, and it's really an excellent product.
Best configuration management software I ever used was CMVC from IBM. It was then replaced by TeamConnection and then canned because IBM made an agreeement with Rational to promote their ClearCase product, which everyone I know who had use CMVC found ClearCase to be inferior.
Now that Rational is being bought, IBM, can you make CMVC/Team Connection open source? God I would like to work again with CVMC...
Remember the year 2000? They promised us flying cars. They delivered the PT Cruiser...
Anyone looking for similar functionality in an open source package may want to check out Valgrind. It is "an open-source memory debugger for x86-GNU/Linux". I've used it for a short while and its great.
Valgrind:
http://developer.kde.org/~sewardj/
"Of all days, the day on which one has not laughed is the most surely the one wasted." -Sebastian Roch Nicol
Rational Rose is the shittiest piece of software I have ever had to use. We have to use it in some CS and SE classes to draw UML diagrams and it is total crap. Not only that but the program costs like thousands of dollars from what I hear.
By judging the one piece of software they make that I have used I can tell you that Rational was not a very good company. Hopefully IBM will fix them so another CS student need not suffer.
ROSE is one of those packages like say I-DEAS that is very frustrating if you don't already know how it works and what to use it for. It does a hell of a lot more than "draw UML diagrams" - if that's all you wanted to do, you should have been using Visio.
If you ever work on a project with a development team of a hundred or more OO developers, then you need what Rational's tools like ROSE have got, there's really nothing else that can manage projects that complex. Harsh as this may sound, if you're an undergraduate you really don't qualify to have an opinion on ROSE either way.
fucked company internal memo here was it so hard to provide a link to it?
Note also that IBM sells a high-end, "supported" version of Eclipse called WebSphere Studio Workbench. This is aimed squarely at the big-bucks* enterprise software development market, the same folks who buy Rational Rose. There's huge money to be made in that market, and IBM wants it.
(*Freudian slip: I originally typed "big bugs".-)
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Togethersoft can do transparent roundtrip engineering.
Rational just manages to mangle code going both ways.
Here's a couple more small things:
- Try to do a rename on a file in CVS and retain the element history. ClearCase does this correctly without having to muck with the repository by hand.
- ClearCase at it's core has a real ACID database to do a better job of preventing data corruption. CVS does not, which can lead to problems - notice newer open source CM solutions (Subversion, BitKeeper, etc.) have followed suit.