IBM Launches Public Domain Project "Eclipse" 205
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.
IBM info at: (Score:5, Informative)
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:How is this different than Sourcefourge? (Score:3, Informative)
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.
"Public domain" license (Score:2, Informative)
"Public domain" precludes licensing. If it's truly in the public domain, no license can be enforced.
Re:Information About Eclipse (Score:2, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Eclipse (Score:1, Informative)
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?
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:Thanks, but whatever (Score:2, Informative)
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
Public Domain (Score:4, Informative)
Eclipse - linux version (Score:1, Informative)
of the linux version. It's available for
download, too.
Re:OK Mister IBM ... (Score:1, Informative)
Not just Java (Score:2, Informative)