The project called Beacon is composed from code and documentation donated by IBM to support and organize software development on Eclipse platform.

IBM wants that structured software development to be used by many more developers and encourage this by giving some of its intellectual property.

“When we’d have arguments over who has the best basic process for development, nobody wins,” Roger Oberg, vice president of marketing at IBM’s Rational division said. “Rather than controlling the basic process framework, we (at IBM) can leverage what the open-source community does. And other software vendors can do the same around our processes.”

The code donated represents 15 percent of the Rational Unified Process a methodology for setting up projects and assigning roles such as testers, programmers and project managers. IBM also donated documentation that suggests a common set of terms, roles and tools for customizing the basic process. “Developers could, for example, modify the basic Rational Unified Process to support different methodologies, such as Agile development,” Oberg said.

The Eclipse Foundation leads the development of Eclipse, the open-source Java application platform and IDE. In 2003 – 2004, the Eclipse Consortium, an unofficial consortium of software industry vendors led by IBM created The Eclipse Foundation, a not-for-profit legal entity to lead and develop Eclipse.