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IBM Launches Public Domain Project "Eclipse"
ccf writes "NY Times is carrying an article about how IBM is launching a new developer organization (Free Reg blah blah blah) called Eclipse, for open source development. The article is not rich in details; it says the stuff will be in the "public domain" but makes no mention of specific licenses." If anyone can find some links that make more sense about what this actually is, please post them.
here!
Listening for the sound of the coming rain...
Its awesome to see IBM commiting to Open Source software, I have been using a PC since 81 and I can remeber a time well, before the invasion of the clones, that seeing IBM back an Open Source project was a pipe dream. IBM still has more clout than anyone out there in the business market, kinda like the old addage, "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM", lets hope it becomes, "Nobody ever got fired for using IBM open source"
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
www.eclipse.org
Listening for the sound of the coming rain...
My theory has been for some time that once the bottom finally falls out of VA, Big Blue will swoop in and get it cheap.
YMMV.
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
Are the big companies, in using Linux here and there in order to gain developer-share in the community, hurting Linux and OS or helping them, in your opinion?
.. can these types of OS minded projects as started by commercial giants end up hurting the OS community more than helping it?
...
I mean, in a scenario like this, which looks like it will benifit the OS community, when/if things happen to sour (or Eclipse simply doesn't end up doing what IBM was envisioning)
Just curious
"Old man yells at systemd"
Actually, I doubt that IBM is trying to be "cool". They definitely don't need it. What they want to obtain is 0-cost software, not in the sense that it costs you $0 to buy, but that it costs them (near) $0 to develop. IBM produces hardware, and hardware sells much better if software is running on it. Software changes daily and is pirated, hardware doesn't.... It's a much safer market.
For the "service" part: IBM sells solutions, which means people at your office solving problems. Again $0 (developement) costs makes this more effective and profitable.
Eclipse contains the tools used to build the Visual Age for Java IDE. These are mainly Java based tools, and include the really cool SWT/JFace graphics library for Java, which be used instead of AWT and Swing. Imagine building UIs for Java which don't suck -- SWT is fast and look like native GUI apps, and don't have the stink of AWT about them.
Some I.B.M. Software Tools to Be Put in Public Domain
By STEVE LOHR
I.B.M. plans to announce today that it is placing $40 million of its software tools in the public domain as the first step toward founding an open-source organization for developers.
The move is the latest step in International Business Machines' embrace of the open-source software model, in which programmers around the world share software code for joint development and debugging. In the last few years, I.B.M. has made big bets on the two major open-source projects, the Apache Web server and the GNU Linux operating system.
The new open-source organization, called Eclipse, will focus on the programming tools used to build applications and other software. More than 150 software companies, from Linux distributors like Red Hat and SuSE to applications developers like Rational and Bow Street, are lined up to join the Eclipse community.
The group plans to establish a governing board later this month, to guide the technical standards and work of the open-source software tools community. I.B.M. will be one of several board members of the Eclipse organization.
"Somebody had to start it, but this is absolutely not an I.B.M.-controlled thing," said Scott Hebner, an I.B.M. software marketing executive.
Traditionally, the standards for software development tools have been supplied by the companies with leading operating systems including Microsoft's Windows, Sun Microsystems' Solaris or I.B.M.'s mainframe operating systems.
Yet Eclipse, analysts say, is a break from the proprietary pattern, and it is coming at a crucial juncture for the industry. The Internet is evolving beyond a medium for viewing Web pages and downloading information and entertainment. Instead, the Internet is in effect becoming the equivalent of an operating system -- a technology "platform," on which programs can be run and built.
New software technologies like Java, the Internet programming language, and XML, a standard for identifying and interpreting information sent over the Internet, are making the evolution possible. And the transition opens the door to a new level of Internet use, from automating online transactions between companies to developing an array of personalized services for individuals.
The potential new uses, made possible by software, are being called Web services. The industry sees Web services as an important new avenue of growth. Major companies including I.B.M., Microsoft and others are eager to develop the new business, and they are all trying to woo developers to their respective camps.
"I.B.M. understands that whoever has the most developers, wins," said James Governor, an analyst at Illuminata, a research firm. "With Eclipse, I.B.M. is making a very aggressive move. It is betting that opening up the software tools ecosystem will work to its advantage."
The move, to be sure, is an attempt to play to I.B.M.'s strength and away from its weakness. Microsoft's Windows and Sun's Solaris version of Unix are the leading proprietary operating systems. I.B.M. has backed Linux, whose code is distributed free, partly because Linux's ascent would work to the detriment of both Microsoft and Sun.
I.B.M. considers it a worthwhile investment to place in the public domain software tools that it spent $40 million to develop, seeing the move as one that further undermines the leading operating system suppliers. I.B.M. wants to take value away from the operating system layer of software and make money mainly by selling specialized software applications to companies and charging for services -- helping companies to integrate various kinds of information technology to make businesses more productive.
"This clearly plays to I.B.M.'s strengths and where our customers want to go," said Steven A. Mills, an I.B.M. senior vice president in charge of the software group. "Customers do not want to be locked into one platform for their information technology infrastructure, and developers do not want to be locked into a single state of mind for development."
The name Eclipse was chosen to suggest that the open-source approach will eclipse the proprietary development model.
The software that I.B.M. is putting into Eclipse and into the public domain include programming tools for debugging, user interface work, editing and project management. The tools employ Java and XML technology, and the intent of Eclipse is to provide a choice of mix-and-match tools.
The Eclipse Project got a lot of buzz at the last OOPSLA conference. A follow-on to IBM's VAJ, it's intended to be a programmer's workbench and include current tools like a refactoring browser, continuous integration. Too bad it seems slashdotted.
It seems to me that Eclipse and Sourceforge are two different entities. Sourceforge has always seemed to me to be a place where Open Source projects are available. Eclipse on the other had is a framework that can be used to write intergrated tools for software products. Using eclipse two different companies tools can integrate in a smart way. Take a look at the website
Think article over at NewForge sheds some light on this. According to them, they feel they can make a fair share of money from Linux. While we are all congratulating IBM on their Open Source move, what might be happening is: They are selling Linux and getting free development work from the Open Source community. It's a creative way to cut back expenses.. just Open Source your work, and get it developed for free.
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Eclipse is an IDE framework written in Java. It is very extensible; all support for editors, compilers, debuggers, and other tools, etc is provided as plugins.
Although it's written in Java, it can be used to develop programs written in other languages; there are already proof-of-concept plugins for C (using gcc) and make.
It is being developed by OTI, an IBM subsidiary who did Visual Age Smalltalk and Visual Age Java. These people have a lot of experience building IDEs.
Currently you can download the basic framework and a set of plugins that let you edit, compile and debug Java applications --- a pretty decent Java IDE. (The very-context-sensitive code-completion is pretty nice. It also has a great feature where it compiles the code every time you save and puts unobtrusive error icons at every line with an error --- an excellent way to keep your source error-free as you go, without getting in your face.) You get the source but currently not under a true open source license. The OTI people promise that they will be moving to a true open source license soon.
This is a big initiative within IBM. The WebSphere Workbench product is already based on Eclipse. Lots of people within IBM, including IBM Research, and several other companies are building new development tools as Eclipse plugins.
One slightly weird thing about Eclipse is that it doesn't use Swing. Instead it has its own toolkit called SWT, which is designed to expose a single cross-platform API but is reimplemented using native widgets on each platform. You can download versions for Win32 and Motif but in the newsgroups some OTI people said that they're working on a Gtk port.
More information at http://www.eclipse.org.
I had a chance to talk to an IBM evanglist personally at a conference. He was a fellow speaker. And we talked about the IBM OSS and Eclipse thing. From what I gathered it is going to be very interesting. Specially it is an OSS development platform where anyone can plug in their development tool. I remember that it was written in Java, but not specifically geared towards Java. In other words I could develop C++ code in Eclipse.
And from what I gathered IBM is TRYING REALLY hard to become more OSS aware. The interesting thing is that while yes it is partly marketing it is also very much desire to see OSS work. Cool to see that IBM is hip again...
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
"Public domain" precludes licensing. If it's truly in the public domain, no license can be enforced.
"Public Domain" means it is not protected by copyright, and therefore there would be NO license whatsoever.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
PD is a license in the same way that zero is a number. When you put somthing in the public domain you are saying "Here it is. Do whatever you want with it." By putting somthing in the public domain, you are relinquishing any and all claim to copyright on it that you may have. Someone else can come along, modify it, and sell it without crediting you. There is no restriction whatsoever on what you can do with a piece of PD code. On the other hand, Open Source licenses like the BSD or GPL licenses allow you to share your code with the but still retain some control over it: BSD basically says that any derivitive code must credit the original author(s), while GPL says that any derivitive code must also be GPL.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Wouldn't it have been on the back burner as IBM tried to push OS/2 and Warp?
I do not have a signature
(Disclaimer: I work for IBM's Research division. What I write here is only my own opinions, not IBM's).
I think IBM found an interesting way to make money from OSS here.
Eclipse is fully open source (it's really cool, BTW. I'm using it for the past two weeks, and while v1.0 still has some rough edges, it is the best Java IDE I've ever used).
Eclipse itself is just a very flexible framework. It ships with a few plugins, also OSS, which make it a Java IDE; but it can also be used (using proper plugins) to develop just about anything else.
IBM will use this framework to develop just about EVERY tool for developers that it has. This include WebSphere Studio, DB2 development tools, MQ Series development tools, the works. However, while the platform itself is open source (and can be used by anyone), the more advanced tools (such as the various eBusiness tools) will not be free.
Naturally, others can also develop their own plugins for Eclipse (and some already do).
- Tal Cohen
What is really interesting is the code name.
What is it, exactly that IBM is trying to eclipse?
Once software has been open-source licensed, it's out there and won't go away, unless it has no merit or appeal to anyone. So it would be difficult for companies like IBM to "hurt" open source by open sourcing more of their software.
Besides, IBM's open source efforts are unlikely to "sour", even if IBM changes direction in future. IBM is going into this with its eyes open, and the people behind this movement aren't naive. The money they're spending on open source can be likened to a marketing budget - the $40 million which Eclipse allegedly cost to develop isn't even enough for a national TV advertising campaign. But it goes beyond marketing - it's strategic, and attracts developers away from their competitors, some of whom don't have a good response to open source (Microsoft) and some of whom are already playing in this space (Sun, with Forte/Netbeans).
So while the big guys duke it out in a "race to the bottom" in terms of the cost and openness of certain kinds of software, we the audience should sit back and enjoy the results. It's competition, and we all benefit from it.
The article got it wrong. According to posts on the newsgroup Eclipse will available under an Open Source License. As many have pointed out, being public domain precludes the possibility of such a license. Once again, it will be a copyrighted piece of software available under an open source license, just like most free software.
Visual Age for Java is one of the best IDE's I've ever worked with (and I've worked with a lot of them). However, in order to acheive some of its power, it sticks all source code into its "repository." The repository is a database with a proprietary format that indexes and cross references all your source.
That would be fine, except that it doesn't play well with tools that expect source to be in text files. You can do it, but you have to export the source and then re-import it once you're done using the tool. Everything from source control to profilers to lints to pretty printers had to go through this dance.
Does anybody know if the Eclipse framework uses the same repository?
A man without a God is like a fish without a bicycle.
IBM: OUR 800 pound gorilla.
Remember IBM used to be evil the way Micro$oft is today? How did they pull their heads out?
In my experience, the primary difference between NetBeans and Eclipse can be summed up in three letters: SWT.
The Eclipse team concluded, based on the common experience of many Java programmers, that AWT/Swing based UIs suck rocks. They look like crap, they don't fit the platform, and they're slow as molasses.
So they threw them away. Replaced 'em with a new, custom written, tiny, lightweight, lightning fast widget system called SWT based on platform native widgets. The result is that SWT UIs are fast, and look great.
As far as features go, NetBeans and Eclipse are quite similar. I prefer the Eclipse UI (I hate the way that NetBeans handles subwindows...), but that's really just a matter of taste. But as far as performance goes... I've been using a version of Eclipse for about two weeks now, and I still can't believe it's written in Java. I've been writing UIs in Java for the last 3 years, and I've gotten so used to the snail-crawl of Swing... Eclipse is a real eye opener.
Just to dispel some myths here, in case this isn't actually a troll. "IBM is simply rolling out a lot of Java code that failed to gain any traction in the marketplace". This is in fact brand spankin' new code that will be the basis of many new IBM development tools and third-party tools. VisualAge Micro Edition (http://www.embedded.oti.com) has a beta available on this technology. "Client apps are butt-ugly". Yes, if they're using AWT and Swing. This is precisely why they do not use AWT and Swing. They use custom widget toolkit, SWT, and I guarantee you that you will not be able to smell the difference between Eclipse and a native windows (or motif, or GTK) application. "Still too slow" We've found Eclipse to be very usable, the most common complaint of slowness in Java applications has been, in the past, the user interface. As I mentioned above, Eclipse does not share this problem. Regarding your last comment, it should be pointed out that despite what you claim, Java is hugely alive in IBM and nearly all of IBM's development tools will soon run on this technology. It doesn't even matter if it's marketed, or if the rest of the world cares; the fact is that it's in use, right now, in IBM in a massively-widespread way, and they are shipping REAL products. Today.
This is actually a very good idea. From reading the text of the article that someone posted here it seems Eclipse is an organization, not a product. The purpose of it seems to be for them to make development software and have people move over to using their free software for development instead of letting companies like Microsoft and Sun try to lock developers into their platform.
This really is a great idea. If there is just an open organization who made developer software their only incentive would be to make the best possible development tools, not to keep out new technologies like Microsoft did with Java.
The fact that IBM has started this and has their muscle behind it is a very good thing. A lot of people should see this as a viable alternative when they hear IBM is behind it.
Of course I could be way off but that seemed to be what the article was trying to say.
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You couldn't be more wrong. When Eclipse 2.0 is released to the public under the open source license ("Real Soon Now"), it will include a lot of brand new code that has never before appeared in any IBM product.
Eclipse avoids one of the worst problems for Java client code, by using native GUI widgets instead of Swing.
Just some weeks ago we had some people from an IBM partner over the floor at my company talking about visual age for java and websphere.
They also mentioned this Eclipse explaining what it was, they didnt say much and i was pretty bored after the long talk about visual age for java and the really good looking debugger it had, but never the less they gave me the this site http://www.eclipse-workbench.com/ which should explain more about Eclipse and the Workbench around it, its some new way to include all IBM develop tools in one workbench and intregrate them all or something and its used for java and stuff and thats all i remember but maybe the site is usefull anyways..
Quazion
I've been using Eclipse for a couple of months now, as my principal Java development environment. Until then, I'd been a text-editor-and-Ant guy (with Jed, a lightweight Emacs clone, as my text editor). Eclipse is the first Java IDE that makes me more productive, as far as I can tell. VAJ might have done, but the repository made it a pain to use.
So, the repository: nope, it's gone in Eclipse. Eclipse *does* maintain a local history, however, and can use CVS very easily. I believe future versions (the R2.0 stream has been promised as "soon" for a short while - I don't expect it'll be long before it's available) will have a source repository plug-in interface (a lot of Eclipse is based on a plug-in mentality) which should make it feasible to integrate it with other tools.
The best feature of the Java editors (for me) is the refactoring. Rename a class, method, parameters, package, whatever, and Eclipse will tell you what it's going to do to all affected source modules, and then do it. Likewise you can extract a block of code as a separate method, or ask Eclipse to give you empty implementations for all the unimplemented abstract methods in a class. Again, the refactoring interface should be available at some stage, and so hopefully there'll be a large list of refactorings available.
Likewise, it has excellent searching facilities - just click on a method and ask for all the places it's declared/referenced, for instance. All very handy stuff.
The support on the Eclipse newsgroup is excellent, and I'm not going to pretend that some of my support of it as a product isn't due to the fact that my first question was answered in a timely manner by none other than Erich Gamma. There are very bright people behind Eclipse. (OTI, basically.) There are also bright people working on plug-ins - Instantiations is working on ways to make it look more like VAJ for those who like VAJ, for instance.
Now, I've only used a small part of Eclipse - the Java development environment. The idea is that it's not just for Java - Eclipse is an IDE *framework* which just happens to come with a Java editor almost as an example. As a Java developer, that may be all that I need, but I like the idea that someone may come up with excellent XML editors etc to plug into it as well. (I believe WSAD already has an XML editor, but an open source one would of course be a Good Thing.)
One vaguely negative thing to note: although Eclipse is fast when it's up and running, it *is* a memory hog. Coming back after lunch and poking at it makes it obvious that an awful lot has been swappped out.
On balance, I love it. Finally, an IDE which actually *helps* me...
Since eclipse.org seems slashdotted, you can get a copy of the technical overview from google's cache, but it's just the text from the pdf (no pretty pictures).
The orginal whitepaper is here
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
this project has been around for a while, I've actually downloaded and compared (briefly) with some other SWING IDE. As an everyday SWING user (JBuilder, netbeans, TogetherJ), Eclipes is FAST! SWING just can't beat the speed!
And Sun has created SWING, and this IDE GUI package is way faster than SWING and I can see SWING die. Hence it Eclipes the Sun. That's the real meaning.
Don't mind if its another netbeans really, I use netbeans, as well as Forte, and maximum respect to those OSS people!
humps
Read the fucking article.
Now go to www.eclipse.org
This a general puropose IDE and is not meant to be used only for Java development. It is written in Java without the part of Java that makes Java Slow (Swing/AWT).
The IDE uses a native widget toolkit called SWT, that is cross-platfrom and is lightining fast. Maybe not as fast as your 31337 perl script on your 386 with 2 megs of ram, but it runs really nice on my celeron 400. Best of all it runs on Linux.
And it since it doesn't even come with a Java GUI app builder, it is not exactly like they are pushing Java GUI apps on you.
I've been using this with Tomcat and it simply rocks!
As Eclipse picks up steam, the C++ and other dev environment plugins will get better, and you can make your fat client apps without java.
and the setup is still kludgey for most.
It's a zip file you extract and run the executable - wow big kludegy setup.
Perhaps you should try it out before you flame it.
Java is just a dog.
It is obvious by your embarrassing display of ignorance, that you should not be in a position to make any of your software related opinions public. Everyone knows that Java is coffee.
Have a nice day.
If you are an IBM customer, you have a zero-cost option of receiving the full source code to OS/390 and VM/ESA.
It isn't truly open source, because the source code isn't available to the general public, only to those with operating system licenses..
However, within the mainframe community, IBM VM and MVS customers are perfectly free to collaborate, swap source code, and inspect both IBM's and each other's code. There is an entire user group, called SHARE, started in the 1960s and still active today, that is largely comprised of systems programmers who have access to and work with IBM mainframe operating system source code.
IBM's MVS and VM source code policy is a big reason why IBM's mainframe line is so successful. The system programmers -- the actual front-line workers in major IT shops, rabidly support and fight to keep IBM mainframe systems, because they know that you can't really support and troubleshoot a computer without the sort of full source code level support you get with IBM mainframe operating systems.
What I like... It gives the open source community the good IDE that I think they've been missing. Yes, I know there are some out there, but frankly this is the first one that I've seen that comes close to Visual C++ or Visual BASIC. Adapt this to GCC/GPP, Perl, Apache, CVS, MySQL, etc. and it will get dramatically easier for people to move their development to BSD or Linux. The more people that use it, the more it will become a standard.
What I don't like... It's still a bit clumsy. Moving between windows with the keyboard just doesn't work the way I expect. The editor does some strange things. (Control-backspace does nothing. You can indent a select block with tab, but can't unindent with control or shift-tab.) I also don't like the focus on Java. It makes it too easy for idiots to dismiss it as another Java tool. Eclipse can easily be an IDE for C++ or other languages and it runs a lot of native code under the covers.
I've been using Eclipse for a couple of weeks now and it is the most impressive IDE I've used on any platform, for any language. What's especially exciting (beyond the pending open source release) is that it is designed, from the ground up, to support plugins. In fact, the comparison I make is not to JBuilder or VisualAge, but to Emacs. Small, central kernel; lots of hooks for plugging in new features, major functionality is itself plugins ... the whole works.
Eclipse is the IDE I've been waiting for, but I can see it eventually taking the form of "the developer's desktop" with plugins completely unrelated to Java, or even code, development.
Eclipse *can* work with your programs that way. OTI is reproducing all the VAJ functionality in Eclipse, and more. It's just stored as regular source files underneath, that's all.
For the more salient example of looking the gift horse in the mouth, you need go no further than Microsoft.
Right now where I work we're seeing streaming media going over Windows Media Player, because it's free for both client and server. To Microsoft's credit, they don't jack the price up the minute the competitor dies in any given arena. In fact, they generally don't jack the price up at all. They merely use the new market lock as a tool to grab another market.
So right now, Windows Media Player is 'free', both client and server, at least until Real and QT both die out.
I always extended the old adage, "There's no such thing as a free lunch." At work when they offer us a 'free lunch' I figure we've either already paid for it, or will be called to in the near future. In either case, the work will be done whether or not the lunch is eaten. So I go and enjoy.
But with either the 'free lunch' or the 'gift horse', there's ALWAYS a price. Sometimes it isn't apparent, sometimes you can't avoid paying it anyway. But you should always try to know what the price is.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
IBM's alphaWorks now has a C/C++ plugin for Eclipse. I haven't used it, but it sounds cool ... a pure Java C/C++ parser (used to maintain indexes and such), and the ability to call out to a native compiler.
Maybe trying the same thing MS did to Netscape with IE. Give away a development environment rather than let the opposition own the development environment. The open nature of it all will hopefully make it far more adaptable and adoptable than the VisualStudio.NET black-hole.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
From what I can see, IBM is already making out big from Linux investments. Largely because of Linux, the mainframe has gone from dinosaur to cool, and that shows up in the bottom line.
Linux is largely about meritocracy, and even in its bad old days IBM had products with merit. Now that the company appears to have refocused after the near-death of the early 1990's that merit appears to be improving and emerging again.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.