Open source development tools like MySQL, Eclipse, PHP or JBoss are now adopted by many software development organizations. Our last poll examined how the quality of open source tools is perceived against their commercial competitors. We conducted a similar poll twice in the past and it is interesting to compare the results.

Open source versus commercial tools
2008
 2006
 2004

Same quality
31%
38%
 32%

There is no easy answer to this question
25%
22%
24%

Superior in quality
21%
20%
26%

Inferior in quality
12%
 12%
13%

I do not use open source tools
6%
6%
4%

I do not use commercial tools
3%
2%
1%

Participants
913
524
312

Source: Methods & Tools
 

IBM and ILOG announced that they have signed an agreement regarding a proposed acquisition by IBM of ILOG to be implemented by way of concurrent cash public tender offers in both France and the United States. The cash tender offer will be at a price of €10 per ordinary share. This will amount to an aggregate purchase price of approximately €215 million or approximately $US340. This price represents a premium of approximately 56 percent compared to ILOG’s one month average of closing share prices prior to July 28, 2008, and …

Sean Christmann has released a new benchmark to understand the performance differences between Flex/Flash, Silverlight, and HTML/Javascript….
GUIMark is a benchmark test suite designed to compare the rendering systems of several popular UI runtimes. In general it should be able to give designers and developers a good indication of which technologies can draw complex interfaces at a smooth rate of motion. The test mostly addresses RIA technologies like Flash, Silverlight, HTML or Java, but was designed to be easily ported to any 2D GUI environment.
http://www.craftymind.com/2008/05/22/introducing-guimark-an-ria-benchmark-for-flex-silverlight-html-and-more/
http://www.craftymind.com/guimark

HP and EDS today announced that they have signed a definitive agreement under which HP will purchase EDS at a price of $25.00 per share, or an enterprise value of approximately $13.9 billion. The transaction is expected to close in the second half of calendar year 2008 and to more than double HP’s services revenue, which amounted to $16.6 billion in fiscal 2007. The companies’ collective services businesses, as of the end of each company’s 2007 fiscal year, had annual revenues of more than $38 billion and 210,000 employees. HP …

The IBM’s Jazz project has just released the beta number 3 of its Rational Team Concert (also named Rational Team Concert 1.0 RC2), the first product based on the Jazz Team Server. I had the chance to attend recently in Geneva to an interesting presentation given by John Kellerman, the product manager of Jazz. A long time IBM employee, John worked already on the AD/Cycle project and has been a part of Eclipse since its origins in 1998. He gave an insightful speech on how a company can “develop commercial …