GNU Christmas Gift: Free Eclipse

Mark Wielaard writes "Your friendly neighbourhood GNU did it again. A year ago IBM made much noise about placing $40 million of its software tools under a free software license. Technically these tools, called Eclipse, are great for developing (java) software. There was only one catch, it was build on top of the proprietary java platform. This made it useless for the Free Software community. Luckily the GNU project has two projects that come to the rescue. GNU Classpath, core libraries for java, and gcj, the GNU Compiler for Java. We are now able to run Eclipse on a completely free platform! It is not yet complete, but you can already edit, compile and browse CVS with it. And since Eclipse uses GTK+ it also looks very nice. I setup a page with instructions on how to get this working so you can help us make it work even better or just so you can view a couple of nice screenshots."

Comments

What do you mean GNU present???

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM was the one who released Eclipse source. GNU and certainly not that wacko crackpot RMS had nothing to do with it. Very misleading topic!!

keep your naiveness to yourself

[Kunta Kinte]

I am getting really tired of Open Source zealots criticizing .NET just because Microsoft created it.

Ok, because, we don't agree with your stance we're zealots now? Whatever happened to free software advocates?

I have lots of doubts with .NET because it's from Microsoft. I don't think my concerns are unfounded. They've done enough in the past, now they arouse my suspicion just by them twitching.

How many times does a person have to screw you over before you stop trusting them? Similarly how many times does a company have to resort to shady tactics before you decide that it's probably in their corporate culture to do so.

My arguements against .NET are not technical, other than I don't think it brings enough to the table to warrant much of interest. It's mostly that sooner or later MS will find a way to screw open source interest with it.