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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........
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.
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.
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.
(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?
You're just plain wrong about this.
I'm an IBMer, who's trying to open-source a related project. One of the issues that we're dealing with is that often, open-sourcing increases the cost of development.
One of the advantages of being closed is control. You get to choose exactly where each programmer works; you get to choose exactly which pieces of the system change, and which don't.
When you open it, suddenly, you lose control. You can't just make decisions anymore; you need to work with your contributor base, which is a much slower process than managerial decree. And you need to deal with the fact that people will be changing things all over the place, and be capable of integrating those changes into your own ongoing work. That costs time(possibly a lot of time), and time costs money. Not to mention the direct costs of
slowed communication, support, bug tracking and handling, patch queue management, security (as
to do open source, you need a CVS server that straddles the firewall), etc. Open-sourcing a
corporate product is not cheap.
Of course, the benefits of opening are often enormous. (I'm not trying to do this to my own system for nothing!) But anyone who open-sources a project hoping to lower their costs through free labor is in for quite a shock. It doesn't happen.
As far as Eclipse goes... I was initially a skeptic when I first heard about it. Now, I've been using it for a while. It's a damned impressive piece of work. You'll never believe it's written in Java; the startup time is a bit long (while the JIT is compiling the whole thing as it loads), but once it loads, it absolutely flies. Looks sharp, runs fast, and gives you
all the hooks you need to hack up your own tools and integrate them into it.
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...