Slashdot Mirror
How Eclipse Independence Will Affect Developers
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.""
"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.
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
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.