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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.
It seems it's about time for IBM to demonstrate their loyalty to Free Software and Open Source by open sourcing Rational Rose -- the free software world is severely lacking in UML diagramming tools. So, what do you say IBM?
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
I don't have all that much to add, except -- God, Rational Rose was one of the buggiest, worst-designed pieces of software I've ever used. The one time I had to use it I prayed that someone over there would buy a copy of Visio to learn how a diagramming tool SHOULD be designed.
I always found it hysterically ironic that a tool that was touted by its makers as the ultimate way to develop software demonstrated so poorly its own usefulness.
Maybe after buying it IBM will run it into the ground ala Lotus. We can only hope.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
What is this some type of cult now?
Instead of coming up with weird 'royalty' reasons, come up with good business reasons for IBM to open source this product.
Hey, I'd love if they do that, and you could argue that there could be some benefits financially to IBM. However, from IBM's perspective, I don't see this is a great move, or something you do right off you buy a company.
- sigs are for wimps.
Here, let me help:
Google
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.
Rational software is some of the worst designed examples of user interface out there. There are two types of people that like rational software:
1. They haven't used anything better like togethersoft or visio.
2. They are management and don't actually have to use it.
Rational and IBM should get along great. Neither company produces good software. But both companies produce incredible salespeople. Working for a large bank, I have a great deal of respect for these guys. How would you like to try selling IBM or rational products? As engineers we are usually too honest. I'd never get anywhere.
Rational sells a process. The process is great for business people because it produces visible artifacts. (Aptly named, as they don't get used and are only good in the archeological sense.)
Togethersoft (recently bought by Borland) has much better software but it is very expensive, and they don't have the quality salesforce IBM has.
So if you think that salespeople don't matter, think again. In this case, they can take a barely functional product and have it dominate that sector of industry. Even in the face of better products.
...otherwise there would be nobody challenging Microsoft in the spreadsheet arena, and we would probably all be forced to use Excel for want of a credible alternative.
I'm sure IBM's acquisition of Rational wlll be equally successful.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
fucked company internal memo here was it so hard to provide a link to it?
I have used clearcase under two environments:
1) My last job: an all-unix network, where all the vobservers and clients were Solaris/linux, with a network administrator who knew what he was doing. The performance was excellent and clearcase really made a difference to the teams productivity. It was certainly better than CVS, which it replaced. Actually, comparing clearcase to CVS is like comparing Matlab to a 5-dollar pocket calculator.
2) My current job, where the vobserver is on Solaris, but all the clients are Win2000, with a drooling windows monkey for a network administrator. While the clearcase GUI on windows is excellent and much better than the unix equivalent, its performance is infinitely worse, with the performance of a view degrading in proportion to the amount of time the windows machine on which the view was created has been left turned on. Finally, we instituted a policy that all win2K machines have to be rebooted every monday morning.
It would be aweseome if IBM would make rational release a linux/unix GUI that is comparable to their windows version.
Magnus.
All that irrational software they've been buying lately.
:-)
I just see the meeting now...
BoardMember1: So we are going to purchase Rational software?
BoardMember2: Don't we always purchase rational software?
BoardMember1: No, we've never purchased Rational software, we've purchased other software before.
BoardMember3: Other software? What, we've been running on irrational software for years?
BoardMember1: No, no, no! The other software we buy isn't irrational, it's just not Rational software.
BoardMember2: Isn't non-rational software irrational?
BoardMember3: I think he's right Bob.
BoardMember1: Okay, okay whatever... We've always bought irrational software.. Now all those in favour of purchasing Rational Software say aye.
Everyone: Aye.
** Meeting Ends **
BoardMember3 to BoardMember2: We're going to have to talk with the older board members... No wonder we've had to much problem.. with all that irrations software we've bought.
*** thank you... thank you... I'll be here all night people. ***
~ kjrose
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.
Point for ClearCase, though how many people really take advantage of this feature (we do not).
A large number of ClearCase installations use MultiSite. It works very well over unreliable networks (I currently use it with a VPN between the US and India) or with no network at all (before we set up the VPN, we did updates via sneakernetted CDs). It also aids in disaster recovery because you can physically destroy one site without affecting any of the others. Lastly, it makes backups dead easy to do.
4. Built-in triggering system for file check-ins and check-outs. This allows you to build scripts and such to do things when you check out/in a file or set of files.
I think you can do that with CVS too.
Almost any ClearCase operation can have preop and postop triggers attached to it. The last time I looked (about six months ago), there was a very limited set of CVS operations that could be triggered, and expanding that set was near the top of the to-do list.
6. Smart 'make' routine which can take advantage of compiled object files in other people's views.
Oh yeah, I'll bet a LOT of people really make use of that one.
In very large (>5 million LOC) projects, ClearCase's wink-in facility is essential. With something that big, you can't just work on your own little corner of things without regard to what the other 1000 developers are doing around you. You've got to be able to regression test the whole thing with your changes applied, and that means building the whole thing.
If your makefiles are written correctly, you get 100% wink-in of everything that doesn't have to be rebuilt as a result of your source changes. If your ClearCase environment is tuned correctly, you can wink in objects somewhere between one and two orders of magnitude faster than you can compile them from scratch, plus you don't have the overhead of initially extracting all the source from the repository.
(Yes, I know about Mozilla. I'm not saying you can't manage large projects using CVS or whatever, but ClearCase has capabilities that CVS could never emulate.)
If you weren't using clearmake and wink-ins on your project, then you were definitely wasting your money on ClearCase.
8. Ability to create branches from the code base for program maintentance, and bug fixing of releases, etc.
Which pretty much defines source control in my mind, again I'd have to give a hand to CVS for much easier branching. I could quickly create branches in CVS whereas in ClearCase it is a Big Deal to create branches, and the SCM people don't like it one bit.
Creating branches in ClearCase is as natural as breathing. All you need is a cohesive branch strategy that you apply across your whole source base, like "I want my version; if that's not available I want the version from the latest official build". The free-for-all "I want 1.1 of this, 2.3.4 of that 5.10.15 of the other" non-strategy will cripple ClearCase, but it will also cripple any SCM practice you try to wrap around CVS or any other tool.
You also forgot that ClearCase can provide build audit trails that are way more comprehensive and reliable than revision strings embedded in the source files. The speed with which that lets me diagnose build failures and related problems wins us back a good chunk of the cost of ClearCase in engineer time savings.
For that matter, the richer set of metadata types that ClearCase provides lets you use know why something happened the way it did far more easily than you could with plan version control.
I've done SCM with a variety of tools for about 13 years now, and without exception, everyone who complained about ClearCase either a) was not using the tool to its fullest, b) was mad because it didn't work exactly like Their Favorite Version Control System, c) didn't know the difference between version control and SCM, or d) was really complaining about having to have any process at all beyond just barfing out code.
There's a new crop of tools coming along that may knock ClearCase off its perch, and ClearCase is far from perfect, but as SCM tools go, it's still the king.