"Bugs, feature planning, release management, translation, testing and QA … these are all areas where we need to improve the level of collaboration BETWEEN projects. I think Launchpad is a good start but there’s a long way to go before we’re in the same position that the competition is in - seamless conversations between all developers." Mark Shuttleworth's blog about the need for collaboration between projects makes for interesting reading. Clearly, what open source developers need is industrial strength Project, Code, Change and Configuration management tools. Where is the Open Source equivalent of IBM's Rational suite products. One unified repository for all software code, release and deployment management and a standardized method of making them interact. IBM has taken steps towards helping the Open Source development community in a few ways. In October 2005 IBM announced that it would contribute a subset of the Rational Unified Process to the OSS community in the form of the Eclipse Process Framework Project. That was a well-intentioned step with industry heavyweights like Capgemini, BearingPoint, Covansys and others lending their support. One can only hope that further development of a unified repository for bug tracking, software architecture and design, and change management tools is in the offing.

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