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IBM Launches Public Domain Project "Eclipse"
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Mon Nov 05, 2001 10:04 AM
from the what-exactly-is-this-anyway? dept.
from the what-exactly-is-this-anyway? dept.
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.
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IBM info at: (Score:5, Informative)
Project home page (Score:3, Redundant)
Awesome, now lets see if the rest follow suit (Score:4, Interesting)
how cute (Score:4, Interesting)
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
Re:how cute (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:how cute (Score:2)
Therefore stimulating the adoption of their software makes sense. The more developers, the more software, the more software the more hardware to run it is sold as well as services to maintain, deploy and support it. Of the shelf software is rapidly disappearing as a viable businessmodel. IBM still has some packages that profitable but they are increasingly niche markets. DB2 for instance is no doubt profitable. Also whatever license fees IBM harvest probably pales in comparison to the revenue from the associated services that come with it. The long term market is that the DB software is free (maybe even as in speech). MS is already planning to integrate SQL server into their OS. When they do, selling DB engines will no longer be a sound business model.
Nice side effect of all this is that in principle you can have good quality stuff for free. Linux has already benefitted from this enormously since many of the improvements in the 2.4 kernel are contributions from various large UNIX vendors. File systems are no core business to anyone any more so you might as well give them away -> linux has dozens of high quality filesystems to choose from now.
The contribution model is beginning to be somewhat mandatory. Very few vendors can actually afford to continue to support their propietary software. If it doesn't integrate with linux it is dead in the water. IBM knows this, SUN hasn't quite figured it out yet.
beauty of open source: they can't help but help (Score:2)
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.
Eclipse (Score:2)
Text of story for the reg-impaired (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Saw this at OOPSLA (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Saw this at OOPSLA (Score:2, Interesting)
Still making money (Score:2)
Re:Still making money (Score:3, Insightful)
Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. It helps IBM, sure. But we all benefit since the code is out there and can be reused in other areas unrelated to IBM so we win too. I think IBM has taken a smart avenue related to Linux. Sure, they need to make money, but they realized early on the only way to make money in OSS is to be accepted as an honest and contributing player by the commuinity which they seem committed to. More power to them!
Re:Still making money (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re:Still making money (Score:2)
No, you're thinking of ActiveState. :)
I know a guy who used to work there. While they do a lot of work on development, their main source of income is support contracts. Which, of course, they use the open-source community for; when their clients ask them questions, they ask OSS developers questions.
Not that I really have a problem with this. By giving us all a reasonable, working Perl for Win32, they help Perl programmers out; it's a symbiotic relationship.
Information About Eclipse (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Information About Eclipse (Score:2)
> Visual Age Smalltalk and Visual Age Java.
I should mention that unlike Visual Age for Java, with Eclipse you can use a variety of JVMs. In particular you can debug code running in any JVM that supports the Java debugging interfaces.
Re:Information About Eclipse (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Information About Eclipse (Score:2, Interesting)
Maybe it's just me, but how does this project really differ from Netbeans [netbeans.org] (except for the whole Sun-IBM sponsorship thing). I've been using it for a while now and it does pretty much everything you mentioned above. It's also been out for a while now (coming out with version 3.3 when Java 1.4 comes out next year) and IMHO is fairly mature.
I'm quite curious to know why I should consider switching.
Difference from NetBeans (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:Information About Eclipse (Score:2)
One major difference is Swing vs SWT. A lot of people want support for native widgets. For example, on Windows, SWT supports ActiveX controls.
There may be significant internal technical differences, but I don't know enough about either system to say.
Re:Information About Eclipse (Score:3, Interesting)
Apart from the SWT versus Swing issue that everyone already pointed out, Eclipse has a *very* good API for plugin development, the whole Java development environment is itself a set of plugins. You can even download a C/C++ environment for Eclipse [ibm.com] from alphaWorks, though that only runs on Linux. I've been writing a plugin for it for the last month or so and it is a joy to develop for compared to Netbeans. From my experience, Netbeans API's accumulated a lot of cruft from version to version and are considerably harder to use.
Eclipse has a quite advanced incremental build system, Java refactoring tools that work well (meaning without breaking the code), builtin CVS support with an excellent way of looking at team development (support for pluggable VCM systems is coming in a later version this month, I heard) and a *very* elegant and functional user interface. Performance is better than Netbeans, too. Apart from CVS support, Netbeans has a ways to go before it catches up with Eclipse on the rest of this stuff. On the other hand, Netbeans has better support for J2EE development in its free versions (Eclipse has none) and has a larger community, though Eclipse is just starting out. I was using Visual Age for server side development and Netbeans for other stuff before Eclipse came along and made a convert out of me.
Re:Information About Eclipse (Score:3, Funny)
My wife's a doula (think assistant midwife), and the pronunciation of that brings something entirely different to mind
Actually something really cool (Score:2, Interesting)
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...
"Public domain" license (Score:2, Informative)
"Public domain" precludes licensing. If it's truly in the public domain, no license can be enforced.
Public Domain = no license (Score:2)
"Public Domain" is a license (Score:2)
Making money from OSS (Score:5, Informative)
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).
eclipse of what? (Score:4, Funny)
What is it, exactly that IBM is trying to eclipse [sun.com]?
Re:eclipse of what? (Score:2)
NOT Public Domain (Score:3, Informative)
Repository (Score:2, Informative)
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?
Re:Repository (Score:2)
How did IBM become cool? (Score:2, Insightful)
Remember IBM used to be evil the way Micro$oft is today? How did they pull their heads out?
Re:How did IBM become cool? (Score:2)
Re:How did IBM become cool? (Score:3, Insightful)
Annual Reports are like newsletters to current and potential insvestors in the company's stock. The highlights:
IBM is a Founding Member and contributor to the Open Source Development Lab.
Over the next three years, IBM will invest more than $300 Million to develop Linux consulting, implementation and support services.
IBM is going to invest $1 billion in Linux, and dedicated 1,500 programmers to enable every IBM hardware and software product for Linux.
IBM, like almost no other company I can think of, has the resources to weather this slump in the high tech sector. It's continued support of Open Source and Linux in bad times as well as the good is encouraging. Red Hat, SuSe, Caldera, and every other distro combined doesn't even come close to the resources that IBM is bringing to the table! In fact they ALL could go belly up and as long as Big Blue is still on board, Linux has a bright future.If "money talks", one-billion-three-hundered-million dollars says volumes, and while "talk is cheap," IBM appears to be putting it's money where it's mouth is. I hope they don't blow it!
Re:How did IBM become cool? (Score:3, Funny)
guess at the purpose (Score:3)
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.
http://www.eclipse-workbench.com/ more info here.. (Score:2, Informative)
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/ [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
Some answers/opinions... (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
cache of Technical overview pdf (Score:2)
The orginal whitepaper is here [eclipse.org]
Eclipes the Sun, get it? (Score:2, Interesting)
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 [netbeans.org] really, I use netbeans, as well as Forte, and maximum respect to those OSS people!
humps
Public Domain (Score:4, Informative)
Re:How is this different than Sourcefourge? (Score:2)
YMMV.
Re:How is this different than Sourcefourge? (Score:3, Informative)
Hardware & Services (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:Better later then never (Score:2)
Re:Thanks, but whatever (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Thanks, but whatever (Score:2, Funny)
Now go to www.eclipse.org [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 [apache.org] 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.
Re:Don't bet on it (Score:2)
Eclipse avoids one of the worst problems for Java client code, by using native GUI widgets instead of Swing.