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How Eclipse Independence Will Affect Developers

Posted by timothy on from the whiter-whites-and-brighter-brights dept.

An anonymous reader writes "There's an interesting article on O'Reilly's OSDir site, with John Weigand, and Skip "former chairman" McGaughey, on what moving Eclipse away from IBM's sole clutches will mean for we ordinary developers. It's interesting to hear a more ground-floor account of this vs the usual "Big XXX Company joined Eclipse today PRs.""

18 comments

  1. GNUclipse anybody? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    The GNUclipse Project has been around for a few years now, and is almost at the point where it could replace Eclipse 100%.

    The only 2 things left to implement are VEP and EMF add-ins, and Eclipse won't be useful to me.

    I highly suggest you check it out if you want an amazing OSS IDE/visual editor.

  2. i think eclipse is cool by cpex · · Score: 3, Insightful

    At school most of my projects end up being java based. I really love using eclipse as an ide. variable name completion, catching all my syntax errors, give me type heirarchies its great. Dont get me wrong i am not an ide dependent, i can use vim over an ssh connection (and i do, a lot)just fine for all my work but boy is eclipse nice. thats all

    1. Re:i think eclipse is cool by cpex · · Score: 1, Offtopic

      i dont get it why did i get modded off topic? a article about eclipse, which i appreciate very much and wanted to express how much thanks i have for the software.

    2. Re:i think eclipse is cool by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Now I didn't mod you, but I'm guessing that your appreciation for Eclipse was not deemed related to Eclipse becoming independent from IBM. But it seems your mod has improved since your post anyway.

  3. uh by bmac · · Score: 5, Funny

    "Big XXX Company joined Eclipse today PRs."

    Does this mean there will be a plug-in for auto pr0n slurping?

    Peace & Blessings,
    bmac
    www.mihr.com

  4. IBM gets it by Phouk · · Score: 4, Interesting
    From the interview:

    "Steve: I just wanted to point out that I think it's a great leap of faith for IBM to let this out from underneath their wing.
    Skip: Yeah, IBM is betting it's business on this, but the total number of developers that IBM is committing is going up and not going down."

    Isn't that the essential open source strategy, giving up some measure of control in return for a bigger growth of the market? Remarkable, some people at IBM seem to get OSS on a strategic level, not just superficially.

    It's an interesting interview, by the way. Consider actually reading it if you haven't. ;-)

    --
    Stupidity is mis-underestimated.
    1. Re:IBM gets it by michaelggreer · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Isn't that the essential open source strategy, giving up some measure of control in return for a bigger growth of the market?

      Its kind of like going public: less control, but more capital. Maybe someone put it this way to the suits.

    2. Re:IBM gets it by ClosedSource · · Score: 1

      "I just wanted to point out that I think it's a great leap of faith for IBM to let this out from underneath their wing."

      Translation: They couldn't figure out how to make money on it.

      "Remarkable, some people at IBM seem to get OSS on a strategic level, not just superficially."

      That must be a tiny minority. Believe it when they start releasing source for products that represent an independent source of revenue (i.e. products that don't lead to hardware sales).

    3. Re:IBM gets it by Spunk · · Score: 1

      That's a great analogy.

  5. Big XXX Company? by The+Waxed+Yak · · Score: 0, Redundant

    "Big XXX Company joined Eclipse today PRs." Damnit, and I started to get excited. No p0rn here folks, move along... sigh...

  6. Future of the Rich Client Platform by rlowe69 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It should be interesting to see if outside contributors will morph the Rich Client Platform into some sort of new browser. It's just being introduced in Eclipse 3.0 and could be the basis for a lot of new Eclipse-partner software.

    OK, so what if you could put a URL into it and it would load a whole application. The bonus is that you don't have to use the limited browser widget set or hacked together CSS-DHTML widgets, but can still deliver a piece of software like an ASP (Application Service Provider) that's NOT DHTML based and all of the advantages of that (instant updates, metered us) for businesses.

    That's not to say there aren't disadvantages, but it will be interesting to see what people come up with.

    --
    ----- rL
  7. an eclipse soon? by Dreadlord · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    huh? You mean there is an eclipse happening soon?

    I doubt it will have any effects on developers anyway, especially we /.ers, who hardly see the sunlight.

    j/k'ing

    --
    The IT section color scheme sucks.
  8. Re:IBM gets it - YES by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    IBM's strategy:
    1. Build a cool java ide
    2. Try to sell it for a profit
    3. Fail to make any real money / don't make a decent ROI
    4. Open source it
    5. Get multiple /. posts
    6. Look like an all around good guy to open source lovers

  9. IBM has software that doesn't lead to hardware? by brokeninside · · Score: 2, Insightful
    That must be the software that leads to service contracts.

    Aside from some of the games, I can't think of any IBM software that doesn't lead to hardware sales and/or service contracts. A lot of large companies go IBM because they can be a one stop shop so a lot of software that IBM does to drive hardware sales may not look directly related to hardware at first.

    That said, they've opened up quite a few of their boxed software products.

  10. The QNX Eclipse situation by Animats · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Eclipse for QNX is in a wierd state. This, roughly, is the situation. I think.

    On QNX, it's the only IDE available. It's used primarily for C/C++ development, not Java development. QSSL (the company behind QNX) supports the Eclipse project, and donated the C/C++ support. But Eclipse has dropped support for QNX becauee QNX doesn't support the Java engine that newer versions of Eclipse need.

    So QSSL sells a commercial version of Eclipse, which is somehow made to work. There's a free version of QNX, but no Eclipse for it, which is a wierd situation for open source software.

    Any comments on this from the Eclipse side of the world?

    I'd like to see full Eclipse support of QNX, without having to run the commercial version of QNX. We have the commercial version of QNX, but some of what we develop is open source, and if we develop that with the IDE, nobody can build it with the free version.