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Actually, according to the patent we don't owe anybody anything.

If you were to RTFA, you would see that it says: A system for displaying the status of a plurality of threaded tasks operating in the background includes a status bar; a progress control bar in the status bar for a primary task operating in the background and including a progress bar and first and second action buttons; the progress bar visually representing progress of a primary background operation; the first action button being selectable by a user for initiating an action with respect to the primary background operation and the second action button being selectable by a user for alternately displaying and canceling a drop list of secondary progress control bars for secondary tasks also operating in the background.

WHICH IS NOT A PROGRESS BAR but rather a special status pane. I don't care if they patent that. I'll implement it with two or three different buttons. I won't use a button, whatever...

Please, don't mislead the readers. And don't consider going into patent law, actually don't consider going into law at all - you have to read the whole document.

On a side note, this is however, what Eclipse uses -- or the whole article. But since development of that falls under IBM, I think we have no problem using that also.

Actually, according to the patent we don't owe anybody anything.

If you were to RTFA, you would see that it says: A system for displaying the status of a plurality of threaded tasks operating in the background includes a status bar; a progress control bar in the status bar for a primary task operating in the background and including a progress bar and first and second action buttons; the progress bar visually representing progress of a primary background operation; the first action button being selectable by a user for initiating an action with respect to the primary background operation and the second action button being selectable by a user for alternately displaying and canceling a drop list of secondary progress control bars for secondary tasks also operating in the background.

WHICH IS NOT A PROGRESS BAR but rather a special status pane. I don't care if they patent that. I'll implement it with two or three different buttons. I won't use a button, whatever...

Please, don't mislead the readers. And don't consider going into patent law, actually don't consider going into law at all - you have to read the whole document.

On a side note, this is however, what Eclipse uses -- or the whole article. But since development of that falls under IBM, I think we have no problem using that also.

C++?? Eclipse does that too. While Eclipse, out-of-the-box is a Java IDE, it was designed to support multiple languages and frameworks, and does so quite well.

Admittedly as applied to the original poster's situation that may be so, however as a general point in using the GPL with your development, eg. linking to libraries etc., it is still an obligation that must be cleared. You may not even know what the eventual plans for the code you're writing are - perhaps they're going to resell the system at a later date? In which case you've just created a situation which requires approval first.

"On the other hand, if you use any software that has a EULA, an actual use license, then you are perhaps agreeing to something when you start using it. But I've never seen any open source software with a EULA."

The specific producst mentioned were Sun's JDK (which we'll skip as it's not open-source), Eclipse and Apache. So looking at the final two.

From the Eclipse Public License page:
"THE ACCOMPANYING PROGRAM IS PROVIDED UNDER THE TERMS OF THIS ECLIPSE PUBLIC LICENSE ("AGREEMENT"). ANY USE, REPRODUCTION OR DISTRIBUTION OF THE PROGRAM CONSTITUTES RECIPIENT'S ACCEPTANCE OF THIS AGREEMENT. ".

From the Apache License page:
" TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR USE, REPRODUCTION, AND DISTRIBUTION"

(emphasis added by me).

So yes, the licenses discussed have terms for use. And the JDK certainly does.

Cheers,
Ian

OK -- I just tried Eclipse and PyDev for the day. I found the process of creating Eclipse projects corresponding to my existing working directories slightly byzantine, but not too bad.

The PyDev addins for Eclipse have some nice features to them, such as code completion, pyLint, outlines and the like. I did not manage to get code completion or Tasks to work -- I hope/imagine another half-day or so of futzing around might solve that problem. I thought SubClipse (the subverson addin) was also very nice.

However, before you try switching to Eclipse have a look at Bug 14654 and Bug 5138. Are you really going to find an editor usable when it fails to get double-clicking right? You might think the problems will be fixed soon, but before you assume that consider that folks have known about the issue for four years!

I'm afraid I will still be counted among those people who use a text editor.

OK -- I just tried Eclipse and PyDev for the day. I found the process of creating Eclipse projects corresponding to my existing working directories slightly byzantine, but not too bad.

The PyDev addins for Eclipse have some nice features to them, such as code completion, pyLint, outlines and the like. I did not manage to get code completion or Tasks to work -- I hope/imagine another half-day or so of futzing around might solve that problem. I thought SubClipse (the subverson addin) was also very nice.

However, before you try switching to Eclipse have a look at Bug 14654 and Bug 5138. Are you really going to find an editor usable when it fails to get double-clicking right? You might think the problems will be fixed soon, but before you assume that consider that folks have known about the issue for four years!

I'm afraid I will still be counted among those people who use a text editor.

1. Java is not a magic bullet, like any language it needs skill and reasoning to use properly, that is not in dispute.

2. Objective-C is a native 'C' compiler based language with no defined security model, thus has many flaws which VM and GC based languages, like Java, lack.

3. I don't care about super computing mathematics, that is a niche activity; all out speed is not my target, reliablity, security, development speed and good enough processing speed are very important to me, my employer and their clients.

Developer time is pretty critical, I don't have the luxury of loads of time to hunt down nasty pointer and buffer overflow bugs, data type glitches or write vast amounts of wrapper code to secure some dated language, a client can lose serious money in that time, I need the language to be secure so that I can concentrate on getting new features and bug fixes out fast, with minimal surprises. The Java compiler and virtual machine has several levels of built-in security, which can be further tightened using code and/or properties files, this prevents most of the classic bugs and security issues of less secure (native) runtime environments. The JVM also automatically profiles running code and compiles busy sections to machine code, so that you can get pragmatic speed optimisation almost for free! Garbage collection is not a significant concern in Java 1.5 and can be greatly reduced with minimal extra design/coding effort. As a bonus the range of support libraries for Java is truely vast and due to the standard file format you don't have the dialect, compiler, linker or make issues of C, C++ etc, even Java version differences can be worked around by using free third party libraries.

As for Java applications:
(most are multi-platform and some are multi-lingual too)

"DBVisualiser" A multi-platform database tool
http://www.dbvis.com/products/dbvis

"Force Field Explorer" A computational chemistry and molecular engineering tool
http://dasher.wustl.edu/ffe

"Azureus" A multi-platform Bittorrent P2P client/server
http://azureus.sourceforge.net/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/azureus/

"Eclipse" A multi-platform IDE and GUI framework
http://www.eclipse.org/
http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/

"Net Beans" A multi-platform IDE and GUI framework
http://www.netbeans.org/

Many of Borlands development product e.g. JBuilder, C++Builder, C#Builder etc., all multi-platform.
http://www.borland.com/us/

Numerous graphics, video, audio and graphical modelling and visualisation tools.

Various GUI charting libraries (Free & commercial), including Crystal Reports...

Loads of web servers, web frameworks and order types of servers: Tomcat, Web Sphere etc.

Loads of XML Tools and libraries, both free & commercial!

1. Java is not a magic bullet, like any language it needs skill and reasoning to use properly, that is not in dispute.

2. Objective-C is a native 'C' compiler based language with no defined security model, thus has many flaws which VM and GC based languages, like Java, lack.

3. I don't care about super computing mathematics, that is a niche activity; all out speed is not my target, reliablity, security, development speed and good enough processing speed are very important to me, my employer and their clients.

Developer time is pretty critical, I don't have the luxury of loads of time to hunt down nasty pointer and buffer overflow bugs, data type glitches or write vast amounts of wrapper code to secure some dated language, a client can lose serious money in that time, I need the language to be secure so that I can concentrate on getting new features and bug fixes out fast, with minimal surprises. The Java compiler and virtual machine has several levels of built-in security, which can be further tightened using code and/or properties files, this prevents most of the classic bugs and security issues of less secure (native) runtime environments. The JVM also automatically profiles running code and compiles busy sections to machine code, so that you can get pragmatic speed optimisation almost for free! Garbage collection is not a significant concern in Java 1.5 and can be greatly reduced with minimal extra design/coding effort. As a bonus the range of support libraries for Java is truely vast and due to the standard file format you don't have the dialect, compiler, linker or make issues of C, C++ etc, even Java version differences can be worked around by using free third party libraries.

As for Java applications:
(most are multi-platform and some are multi-lingual too)

"DBVisualiser" A multi-platform database tool
http://www.dbvis.com/products/dbvis

"Force Field Explorer" A computational chemistry and molecular engineering tool
http://dasher.wustl.edu/ffe

"Azureus" A multi-platform Bittorrent P2P client/server
http://azureus.sourceforge.net/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/azureus/

"Eclipse" A multi-platform IDE and GUI framework
http://www.eclipse.org/
http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/

"Net Beans" A multi-platform IDE and GUI framework
http://www.netbeans.org/

Many of Borlands development product e.g. JBuilder, C++Builder, C#Builder etc., all multi-platform.
http://www.borland.com/us/

Numerous graphics, video, audio and graphical modelling and visualisation tools.

Various GUI charting libraries (Free & commercial), including Crystal Reports...

Loads of web servers, web frameworks and order types of servers: Tomcat, Web Sphere etc.

Loads of XML Tools and libraries, both free & commercial!

jEdit with Python-related plugins, or Eclipse with PyDev or TruStudio

i'm in a similar situation, having just bought my first mac, but i'm looking for ruby ide's. os x is fantastic, and so far ahead of desktop linux, i dont want to go back. one thing that lets it down though, are the ide's available. i've settled on eclipse, since it handles python, ruby etc. you do need to install python/ruby support, but it's easily done. the python extensions can be found here: pyDev

Subversion for source control. (The Eclipse development platform has plugins for PHP and Subversion.)

There are tons of good bug trackers out there. I like Mantis.

Otherwise, I guess you are stuck with java and some inferior development suite. ..such as eclipse, is a very good free development environment for Java. And it runs on any platform that runs java. .. and as it's free, you can use your free time to get better at developing. ;-)

They've made it free because eclipse is about to kick their ass off the IDE map.

Soon, even the "enterprise" IDEs will be free or nearly so.

I use both languages on a regular basis. One of the compelling arguments toward Java for me is that the tools are better and cheaper. You can download Eclipse for free, and in my opinion it's the best development environment available, hands down. Lots of free Java servers out there, and the open source community has made a whole lotta great stuff to make your job as a programmer easier. Visual Studio, the best game in town 6 years ago, is pathetic by today's standards.

But Java's Swing problems, startup time, and memory requirements pretty much lock it out of all those categories except web apps. OK, I'll bite. What are Swing's problem's? Too flexible? Too many GUI builders available ? Too cross-platform? Also you forgot the category of delivering rich client apps over the web without requiring installation or any Web programming (Java Web Start). Swing is actually great for a lot of things. (Yes, azureus is pretty beautiful -- but look at its startup time. No problem for an app like that, but I hate waiting for apps to start up.) Azureus isn't Swing it's SWT. http://www.eclipse.org/swt/

SWT works by interfacing with the current windowing system, rather than having its own widgets like Swing does.

Eventually, you'll want to move to Eclipse, but you can start off with BlueJ, which will help you learn the basics before you try anything more advanced.

If it were me, I'd go with Java and use the Eclipse IDE. Java is fairly easy to learn, fairly powerful and has large, useful standard class library and has a wealth of additional libraries (many F/OSS) available. If you're interested in grabbing stuff off the 'net, look into Jakarta Commons HttpClient. Or, for other protocols than HTTP, look into Jakarta Commons Net. If you want to invoke web-services calls, you might find Apache Axis useful.

As far as look and feel, Swing has come a long way as a GUI toolkit, but a lot of people like Eclipse's SWT. If you use Eclipse and the Rich Client Platform as a base for your applications, you get a lot of functionality "for free." It's probably worth your time to give it a look see at least.

If you don't like any of that, just use GNUStep and Objective-C.

If it were me, I'd go with Java and use the Eclipse IDE. Java is fairly easy to learn, fairly powerful and has large, useful standard class library and has a wealth of additional libraries (many F/OSS) available. If you're interested in grabbing stuff off the 'net, look into Jakarta Commons HttpClient. Or, for other protocols than HTTP, look into Jakarta Commons Net. If you want to invoke web-services calls, you might find Apache Axis useful.

As far as look and feel, Swing has come a long way as a GUI toolkit, but a lot of people like Eclipse's SWT. If you use Eclipse and the Rich Client Platform as a base for your applications, you get a lot of functionality "for free." It's probably worth your time to give it a look see at least.

If you don't like any of that, just use GNUStep and Objective-C.

You might be interested in the Eclipse RCP developing environment. It's Java based so it will run just about anywhere, it's heavily OO design patterned so there's quite a bit of API to chew but it has a nice GUI editor. I'd give it a bite...

Its primary focus is Java, but you can use it for multiple languages. If you were to spend time with an IDE (and some would say that in itself is evil) Eclipse is the one I would pick.

http://eclipse.org/downloads/

Going further, I'd probably say you want to putter around with web applications. (Tons of people out there doing PHP, etc, but I would stay on the Java side of the fence) Building web apps, you can start with the spaghetti pages filled with scripts, start encapsulating code, pick up on a MVC framework, DB access, or deployment frameworks. I'd shy away from doing client applications. Again, from the Java camp, I'd snag a copy of Tomcat for my local playground. Anything you do inside the JSP/Servlet container is more or less applicable to BEA or IBM's application server. Nice debugging tools that let Eclipse and Tomcat play together.

http://tomcat.apache.org/

I realize you're a troll, but this comment I just don't understand. I've used Eclipse daily since 2.0, and I can say it gets usefully better with each milestone. I haven't used VS since college, so it might be the dog's bollocks, but VS's goodness has nothing to do with Eclipse (other than perhaps providing some competition).

Eclipse has vibrant development community, that it's open source makes plugin development easy and rewarding. I don't know what you're running on that makes it slow, but I've haven't experienced "flaky" since 2.0 (with the exception of external plugins).

If you'd like to try an great plugin (in alpha) that does make Eclipse flaky and slow, but can make you more productive (if you work on large products) check out Mylar.

I'll never understand the weirdo hating that goes on on this site....

A lot of people have already mentioned the PyDev plugin for Eclipse. You may also like to know about TruStudio (another Eclipse-based IDE) which supports Python and PHP amongst other "scripting languages", and perhaps something like Stani's Python Editor. I've got all three, plus a couple of other generic editors like Vim, Notepad++, NewEdit, JEdit, also PythonWin (which comes with ActivePython, but you can get it separately for vanilla Python.org).

I try to use Eclipse for all my project/documentation work, whether it's a Java project, Visual Studio.NET or whatever. From within Eclipse, I use the TimeTrack plugin (I'm using an older one for Eclipse 3.0).

It tracks your usage relating to the project and the file you're working on, with a resolution of about 2 minutes. You do have to remember to use Ecilpse to select/open the file (so it knows what you're working on).

It's certainly not perfect, but is functional, and it's XML output is easy to manipulate and filter on (I use Excel for tabulation).

To paraphrase Jonathan Edwards, I used to be a language bigot and now I'm a tool bigot.

(And yes Smalltalk had a great IDE (and framework) in it's day (and Squeak is still fun, fun, fun), but for building non-trivial web apps, the tooling on the Java side beats anything else I know of...)

>> I really do hate the virtual machine implementation.

Give GCJ a look. It's a front-end to GCC that produces machine code from java source. It may not produce code that runs as fast as a hotspot VM, but it does a reasonable job and you don't have the start-up cost of a VM. GCJ can be built so that it cross-compiles too.

If you're interested in ditching SWING, consider SWT the presentation underpinnings of the Eclipse ide.

>> I really do hate the virtual machine implementation.

Give GCJ a look. It's a front-end to GCC that produces machine code from java source. It may not produce code that runs as fast as a hotspot VM, but it does a reasonable job and you don't have the start-up cost of a VM. GCJ can be built so that it cross-compiles too.

If you're interested in ditching SWING, consider SWT the presentation underpinnings of the Eclipse ide.

Well, at least for some of these, I still use Eclipse.
For Perl:
http://e-p-i-c.sourceforge.net/
For Ruby:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/rubyeclipse
For Latex:
http://texlipse.sourceforge.net/
For C++:
http://www.eclipse.org/cdt/

More and more languages are finding support in Eclipse with plugins. Granted, emacs is good for editing in the general sense, but for any serious development, I find myself turning to eclipse.

I don't see any line item bugs for "Make Emacs like Eclipse". There should be.

Eclipse kills emacs. Emacs will be relegated to a super niche market if it does not borrow some of the techniques of Eclipse.

Eclipse has many more than the following advantages:
Programming domain issues have been thought out. Code gen follows some patterns, and eclipse makes far better use of them that emacs
-- Such advantages as click on a variable to go to its instantiation.
-- Underlining errors
-- sure you CAN spend hours trawling for the modules to do the same for emacs, but that sucks, and yields variable results.
A unified project space is opened up by default. You can see all your files.
-- It takes a while to work out where Speedbar is under emacs and it sucks. Even if it sucks it should be opened by default, like *scratch*

I'm happy to use Emacs everyday. But the reason I use it is:

I finally have a .emacs I'm happy with
You can run it well over ssh
It has emacs keybindings [duh, but important]

These are not enough reasons to bring new emacs users into the project. What do we do if RMS is hit by a bus or the existing emacsers eventually die of old age? Emacs people need to form and take ownership of sub projects around certain problem domains. e.g. Go HERE for Perl Emacs and HERE for XML editing. At the moment all you have is a loose coalition of Perl.com et alia articles.

On the other hand, Eclipse is predominantly developed by IBM and, as far as I know, doesn't have the restrictions that you spoke of in OOo. I don't really know that much about Eclipse, but it seems to be fairly successful despite the fact that there aren't a huge number of other companies developing it along with IBM. Would it still be classified as an open source project?

Sorry, but IBM only started out as the primary developer. The Eclipse Foundation is now substantially more than just IBM. There are a lot of other very big players involved with Eclipse including CA, Intel, BEA, Borland, Sybase, Zend among others.

Saying Eclipse is dominated by IBM is like saying Linux development is dominated by Redhat. Sure, they're big players when it comes to contributions, but they don't make up the majority on their own.

It's interesting you should mention this.

I'd personally have contrasted Eclipse (IBM http://www.eclipse.org/) to OpenOffice.Org (Sun http://www.openoffice.org/) in that kind of article.

On one hand, we've got a product that's exploded with features in the past few years, vs a product that's gotten better, but not by a lot.

Eclipse has matured extremely quickly into not only a base for building IDE tools, but as a base for building complete applications (rich client applications), and an excellent community has formed, with both opensource and closed source/commercial plugins available from a variety of locations.

OpenOffice has grown to be effectively a cut down, free, version of Sun's StarOffice, with features that get left out due to Sun's policy on making sure that the commercial StarOffice contains more features and has more QA. This appears to be in an effort to maintain control over the *Office codebase.

At first glance, it's hard to tell why the differences exist. Both were commercial products, that were opensourced. Both are still maintained by a central company's policy. Both have benefitted from patches from the community. Yet only one is what I'd call a successful opensource product.

I think it's fairly safe to say that Sun has a poor mindset when it comes to opensource software. I'd be completely unsurprised if OpenSolaris falls straight down the same tube. I don't see how anyone can draw the conclusion that opensourcing a commercial product will fail. It still comes down to the processes in place.

ash

You make a good point; TI is no friend to open source or Free software.

I wouldn't agree with such a blanket statement. TI is currently contributing actively to Eclipse, for example.

www.eclipse.org

In theory, the JIT should be able to produce code that runs as fast or faster than C/C++. The JIT compiler has much more knowledge of the execution environment (CPU, memory, graphics) and should be able to optimize the program exactly for this one computer. It has't happened yet though. I'm waiting for it though because Java 5.0 is a fantastic language and I would love to drop C++ for it.

Right now, SWT is the only thing I've found that makes Java UIs bearable for the majority of programs. There are always exceptions to the rule and I'm sure there are some applications where the developers have been able to get decent speed with Java, but the typical C++ program has a considerably more responsive UI than the equivalent Java program when written by programmers of similar talent.

I've been building major websites for about six years now and believe me, writing in C# using VS.Net is far superior to most other tools. Eclipse is coming around now with their Web Tools Project (http://eclipse.org/webtools/) but the proliferation of Java frameworks (Hibernate, Spring, Struts, and JSF) as well as servers makes for a lot of distractions that you just don't have to put up with in the dotnet world. Wish that I could just choose the best tool and use it, but believe-it-or-not there are some clients that prefer their politics to dictate what kind of platform their custom software runs on. It's idiotic really. So somebody has to do the Java coding and it's not going to be some newbie, because it's simply too complicated.

I do all of my development for Microsoft OSes on Mandriva 2006.

Eclipse(http://www.eclipse.org/ + Java = dev heaven.

I try to keep the amount of time my WinXP machine is turned on and connected to the Net at an absolute minumum.

Having tried Aspect-J in a production environment, I found an unhappy surprise.

When you move beyond the trivial examples, you will encounter Aspect-J's long-standing bugs that simply crash your IDE every five minutes. For example, this P1 critical bug makes Aspect-J unbearable:

https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=4421 5

I've heard of JBoss AOP being used successfully in production (http://www.jboss.org/products/aop).

Eclipse is written in Java.

VS sucks, I use Eclipse instead, which has everything VS.NET has, minus the bugs, minus the bloat (100Mb installer versus 3.6Gb installer), and with additional features VS does not have. VS is not a programers dream, it is a programmers nightmare. BTW, Bill Gates did not create his empire by coding. He created it first by copyright infringement and then by marketing; by chance it all fell into his lap when Digital Research didn't get the IBM contract and he happened to be in the right place at the right time. The empire has since been built on further copyright infringement and marketing, and also other criminal activites as they were caught and found guilty of (and unfortunately not punished for). You'll also note in the sidelines that the express edition of VS is NOT free, it is no-cost for a 12 month period. What happens in 12 months time is anyone's guess, but with Microsoft's known track record and current activities it's fair to propose that this so-called "free" offering is nothing more than lock-in so they can charge a massive subscription fee later on. I'm fairly certain that practice is illegal, but hey that's what Microsoft are founded on.

The Eclipse project has been working on business reporting for quite some time. They presently have a rudimentary BIRT module (Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools) that, for its limited breadth and depth, is actually fairly impressive. One of Business Objects' competitors, Actuate, already has a product built on top of Eclipse.

Hopefully, this shift will pan out as a move to better integration of Crystal Reports with web services without having to shell out for Crystal Enterprise. Up through the present, most of Crystal's eggs have been placed in the COM basket so that reporting is best automated through Windows programming. This is great in that you can automatically connect to a database, run a report, export the output and email the export in a few dozen lines of VBScript. But if Business Objects is moving to web services, it will offer a great deal more flexibility as automation will no longer be restricted to Windows.

Baghira [sourceforge.net] -- A native QT style that faithfully imitates OS X eyecandy, aimed at new users coming from the Mac world.

Have you ever used OS X? Baghira doesn't come close. It sortof gets the look, but the feel very poor compared to the real thing. Try OS X for a week or so, then see if you think Baghira comes anywhere near it. I'm posting on a PowerBook (w/ Tiger), BTW.

Kdevelop [kdevelop.org] for syntax highliting, application templates, and project organization.

Eclipse? KDevelop used to be my IDE of choice until I started using Eclipse.

Kaffeine's cool, though it'd be nice if I could close it without having to killall -9 it afterwords. It seems that every time I close it, it instead goes into the background and starts taking up all the processor. Latest version, multiple distros. If they could fix that it truely would be an awesome player.

QT designer, I'm not going anywhere near that. I'd like to have the option to dual license my work some time in the future...

AmaroK is awesome, I can't praise that enough. Whenever I'm away from Linux I have to get by with iTunes (Mac, Win).

I guess there are more reasons than these, but those were the ones that came to mind at the moment.

Now millions of students will have access to a cheap, industry standard IDE to code in...

Yeah! Since it's not like there's a kick-ass, extensible open source IDE that you can download for free which supports a whole range of languages, including C#...

Now millions of students will have access to a cheap, industry standard IDE to code in...

Yeah! Since it's not like there's a kick-ass, extensible open source IDE that you can download for free which supports a whole range of languages, including C#...

Eclipse is a rather nice IDE. It's just a shame that you can't (yet) use it for anything other than Java.

Show me a working Eclipse-like environment for C or PHP then I'll be impressed.

I find Microsoft tools like VS.net and even some of their languages (C#) to be surprisingly good.

Compared to what? You haven't used Eclipse, have you? I use both Eclipse and VS.Net 2003 at work, and VS.Net is "good enough" as an IDE but miles away from the productivity you get from Eclipse.

Not only is Eclipse one of the best IDE's out there, it is free/open source and available for multiple platforms. And it's not just for Java, it also does C/C++. And there are plugins for Python, PHP, Ruby, etc.

1) Hardware (keyboards, mice, ...)
certain Microsoft things like Natural Keyboards

I used a Microsoft Natural Pro (the only good one they made) for over a year, but soon realized what an inferior keyboard it was when I tried some older non-split keyboards. But that really applies to most keyboards made these days, they are almost all crap. Pick up a buckling spring keyboard from here and you'll find your typing speed and comfort increase. They are not as loud as you'd think either (maybe the original IBM's were), but they do sound different.

Microsoft's recent keyboards have one incredibly stupid "feature": no Insert key. Need I say more?

I've used plenty of Microsoft mice, from the standard white ones (which weren't too terrible) that used to come with most PC's, to the Intellimouse's (total crap). The Intellimouse I had at work, despite looking cool and having a bunch of fance buttons, was two heavy and did not fit my hand correctly, I eventually ditched it and brought in a Logitech I had at home. All the Logitech mice I have used have been better than any mouse Microsoft has produced. Right now I'm using an MX310 which is great if you don't mind that its not wireless.

Microsoft's products (hardware and software) are "good enough" but not certainly not "great," especially when you compare them to what else is out there. It's hard to realize this if you haven't experienced much else.

To a customer, quality makes a difference.

There are plenty of good alternatives that I don't have to pay for (beyond what I already pay for the OS in any case): Swing, wxWidgets, Gtk+, Cocoa, MFC, .NET,

Good but not great.

• Swing - how many Swing-based apps do you see out there? Not many because it looks like, well, Swing. And it's slow. Not native. However, this is probably the best of the bunch from your list, next to Qt. To make up for the disadvantages with Swing, IBM came up with the SWT toolkit, which Eclipse is built on.
  
• wxWidgets - workable toolkit, but documentation, ease of use leaves much to be desired. You get what you pay for applies here.
  
• GTK - Linux only. C based, so no OO, in my book a generation behind Qt/Swing/etc.
• Cocoa - only OSX, so you can't really compare.
• MFC - you've obviously never used this clunker, largely hated in the GUI world. Obviously not even comparable since only runs on Windows. Not much good with out Visual Studio either, and that'll cost ya.
• .NET - works only on, well, Windows. That's right, don't even think about MONO. Again, not much good with out Visual Studio, and that'll cost ya.

Meanwhile, KDE is built with Qt. Need we say more?

As a committer on the CDT Eclipse project, I can say right now that if you are doing doing win32 or MFC development, right now you'd be crazy to not use Visual Studio over Eclipse, unless you're willing to help work on the IDE support yourself.

Right now work is beginning in the CDT community on a prototypical debugger that uses the dbghelp APIs of Microsoft's free windows debugger (WinDbg). Work is also ongoing in the community on support for the Visual C++ compiler under CDT's Managed Build System. What's really needed right now is people to help out on these efforts, and someone to step up and make a windows resource editor (a la Eclipse's Visual Editor Project). We would love for CDT to be a serious (and free!) competitor to Visual Studio that required only the free debugger, compiler, and platform SDK downloads from Microsoft that are currently available... help us make it happen.

You forgot CDT Project for C and C++ development. The project is growing in popularity to the point where we're having our own developer's conference in a couple of weeks, totally separate from EclipseCon.

It's starting to seem like everyone and their brother that's doing a C/C++ IDE is standardizing on CDT. If the trend continues, perhaps one day we will unseat Visual Studio as king of the heap, although there is a long way to go still.

The most important thing I can say, regardless of your language of choice, is to grab a keyboard and lend a hand, if you're able, to your favourite project. Eclipse (and CDT especially) are community driven, and the best way you can help these tools succeed is by giving us some of your spare cycles, even if it's just filing the bugs that you find. If you submit patches for them along with the bug report we'll love you forever :-)

In these latter days, you don't even need to do that -- tools like Eclipse handle and build C (actually, they'll run your makefile for you, if you want to) just fine.

See the CDT at http://eclipse.org/cdt

I hope 2005 is a bit better, for the sake of my sanity. From what it sounds like, this should be the case.