I think you'll find that the communities around the Rational "team tools" (like ClearCase and ClearQuest, and now Rational Team Concert) are somewhat different. In particular, half (or more) of the value around the team tools is their consistency and longevity (so for example, the ClearCase user community has been going strong for a decade or two). So I completely agree with your comments on the importance of consistency and community. That is why when we started the Jazz project to provide a common team software development platform, we also started the www.jazz.net community site, to support that community (based on our experiences with participating in successful open source communities).

Lot's of good questions here ... I'll try to respond to a few ... Jazz is a server-platform for team tools. It provides a variety of services, including some WebUI services for writing Web clients for your tools. So if anything, a WebUI is the primary interface for the Jazz tools. Some tools, especially SCM tools, live best in an IDE because that's where most developers live these days (usually not just on the Web, because the tools they use expect to find their data in the file system, and put their results back in the file system). So RTC (which contains an SCM tool), needs to live in the developer's IDE. So Eclipse is an important client for RTC (as is Visual Studio, and there is an RTC client that lives in Visual Studio). Other Jazz based products that are not focused on the developer will often only have a WebUI, and not provide an Eclipse UI. So Jazz is only like Eclipse by analogy ... i.e. like Eclipse, the goal of Jazz is that you can "plug-in" any component you want, or you can buy plug-ins from Rational or other companies (Rational is just the "first" company selling Jazz "plug-ins" like RTC). But unlike Eclipse, Jazz is not an open source project, and unlike Eclipse, you do have to pay IBM to buy/use the Jazz platform. But that's no different from other platform providers ... lots of folks sell applications that run on Windows, but you still have to pay Microsoft to use the Windows platform.

In my view (I primarily do ClearCase, ClearQuest, and Rational Team Concert, but I have contributed to the SCM section of RUP), the "Unified Process" was more an attempt to provide unified terminology and remove gratuitous differences, than it was to define a "one size fits all" process (which is clearly impossible). The experience of evolving RUP resulted in tools that let you define your own process (using whatever bits of the Unified Process that you thought appropriate). In particular, IBM Rational sells that that tool as the "Rational Method Composer". But that process was mostly (and in many cases, completely) information intended to be read by a human. What Rational Team Concert provides is "executable process guidance" (that instead of just being read by a user, is executed by the tools in response to actions performed by the user, similar to triggers in ClearCase and hooks in ClearQuest). Currently, the RMC team is working closely with the RTC team to unify the human readable process description provided by RMC with the executable process guidance provided by RTC. WRT creating sequence diagrams and such, that is the "Rational Software Modeler", not RUP or RMC (although you can use RMC to create sequence diagrams to model your software processes, so I can see how over the years the two could get confused, especially with the acronym similarity between RMC and RSM :-). WRT open source'ing things, although IBM in general and Rational in particular do contribute people and effort to open source projects (such as Eclipse, Linux, and Apache projects), neither RTC (the product) or Jazz (the platform) will ever be an open source project ... the source code of RTC and Jazz is owned by IBM. What we are doing with RTC and Jazz is using the development techniques of an open source project to develop a commercial product (we call it "Open Commercial Development", to emphasize it is not "Open Source"). WRT dependencies on ClearCase, there are none. You can use ClearCase, RTC, or both (my team happens to be putting a lot of effort into the "or both" scenario, so I care a lot about that, but you don't have to). So believe me, the FUD is not from us (:-). Eclipse is (and always will be) an open source project, that happened to be originally started by IBM (which is still contributing a lot of people and effort to the project, because we continue to believe that kind of tool is best done as an open source project). RTC (and the Jazz platform) are not (and never will be) open source projects.

WRT the marketing-speak on the jazz.net web site, well, we turned it over the top couple of layers to the marketing group a year or so ago so we could focus on writing code (:-). But if you want to see the real stuff just drill down a couple of layers into any of the pages, and you'll find that it's still where the development work is going on ... that would include the work items, the plans, the forums, the mailing lists, the wiki, the white papers, the blogs (well, most of the blogs :-). If I were you, I'd skip the twitters (:-). How is it different? It's our full time jobs, but we're encouraging not only all of our customers, but anyone who is interested (including our competitors) to see (and comment on) everything that we are doing ... our plans, or discussions, and even our source code. As for limited functionality, have you tried the free edition of RTC (Express-C)? It has virtually every feature of RTC (except for the integrations with ClearCase and ClearQuest ... and if you're using ClearCase and ClearQuest, you're clearly someone who is willing to pay for your software tools :-). The only thing it limits is how big your team can be to use it. (We really do have to charge for it at some point :-).

As background, I work for IBM/Rational, participated in the design and construction of RTC from its inception, and among other activities, have been leading the teams building the "Connectors" between RTC and ClearCase/ClearQuest. Back in 1995, I joined Atria to work on ClearCase. So why did we created a new product?. Over the years we've observed that for large software projects, what mattered even more than point tool functionality was how well the different tools were integrated. More recently, as companies started focusing on agile development where single individuals perform multiple roles concurrently, the same became true for smaller software projects. So we put increasing amounts of efforts into integrating our tools. But we concluded that without a tool integration platform, there's only so far we could go (and in particular, the integrations were tool version sensitive, requiring upgrading the tools together, which is not something users wanted to do). And even with a tool integration platform which improved the level of integration of all the tools, we also concluded that the only way to get optimal integration is to also build the products specifically for that tool integration platform. In addition, a requirement for ClearCase and ClearQuest has always been that they handle all SCM (software configuration management) and CM (change management) problems that our customers have encountered over the years, work on all hardware and OS platforms, and remain compatible with all previous versions we've released. But that breadth of coverage comes at a cost ... both in performance and in ability to do all the new cool things that we and others have thought of. So a few years ago, we started Team Concert, both to build the platform that we were going to use to improve the integration between all of our tools, as well as to build new instances of those tools that were designed to take optimal advantage of that new platform. And while we were building those new integrated tools, we were also free to focus those new tools on the most common problems and the most common platforms, since we had ClearCase and ClearQuest to back the new tools up with breadth of problem and platform coverage. The "Connectors" then plug ClearCase and ClearQuest into that platform, and into those new tools, so that a customer can use the new tools when appropriate, and use ClearCase and ClearQuest whenever they weren't. And the integration between all these tools were enhanced by the Jazz integration architecture (i.e. it was no longer an either/or ... a customer uses whatever tools best solve their problems). And while all this is going on, we continue to invest heavily in enhancing ClearCase and ClearQuest (we have significantly more people working on ClearCase and ClearQuest than we do on Team Concert). At any rate, that was the idea (:-). For some more perspectives on this question from some other folks, you can also listen to the webcast: http://www.rational-ug.org/webcastDetail?wid=74.