A little more than a year ago, detractors painted the Eclipse open source project as nothing more than a ploy by IBM to sell its own software. Today, by most accounts, it's the centre of innovation in the Java tools industry.
On Monday, a sold-out EclipseCon conference opened and, unlike last year's inaugural meeting, IBM technical gurus are not be the centre of attention.
Instead, the open source foundation feted its newest board members -- IBM's rivals BEA, Sybase and Borland -- and detailed the expanding list of development-related projects under Eclipse's purview.
"Eclipse is definitely the dominant Java tools platform," says Thomas Murphy, an analyst at the Meta Group. "And increasingly, the Eclipse organisation will be pushing this message of a general-purpose platform."
IBM founded the Eclipse consortium in November 2001 with $40m in seed money and a substantial donation in code. Today, the group has 91 members, including most of the largest software companies. And it produces what is now the most popular Java development tool, according to Evans Data.
Eclipse became an independent nonprofit foundation, spun off from IBM, one year ago. That independence helped fuel its momentum, as vendors such as BEA, which once stayed clear of Eclipse, began jumping on board.
In effect, Eclipse has managed to unify the great majority of Java providers -- with the notable exception of Sun, and limited participation from Oracle -- something that years of industrywide standardisation efforts never did.
"It's over," says Bob Bickel, vice-president of corporate strategy at open source Java company JBoss, referring to competition in the Java tools industry.
"Eclipse has just reached that tipping-point critical mass. There's the economic interest among all the vendors to drop their costs of creating new toolsets," he says.
Open source in suits' clothing
Having a common development-tool technology is vital in Java vendors' shared fight against Microsoft. Winning over developers has been a long-standing battle between the two camps, because programmers can influence the choice of pricier, back-end software for running business applications.
The Eclipse software in some ways mimics what Microsoft has with its flagship development product, Visual Studio.
The Eclipse Platform, as it's called, lets a programmer use several different tools from the same application. From the same front end, someone can combine tools for writing code with "plug-ins" for modelling databases or testing applications. IBM is using the Eclipse software to provide a common foundation for its suite of development tools, giving a disparate product set a common user interface as well as a mechanism to share information.
Microsoft has a similar "platform" approach, in that third parties can write add-ons for Visual Studio and developers can write code in many different languages.
Perhaps the most glaring difference between the Eclipse approach and Microsoft's is that the Eclipse software is open source. But the Eclipse Foundation is somewhat unique in its structure, reflecting how corporations are increasingly active in open source projects.
Hardly a grassroots collaborative effort willing to take code donations from volunteers around the world, Eclipse is directed by vendors. Employees from software vendors hold nearly all the board positions and make up the majority of the contributors.
That vendor membership is by design, says Mike Milinkovich, the executive director of Eclipse. Eclipse's software has developed rapidly because of such membership, coupled with the open source development model, he says. That's as opposed to a model that relies on industry consortia such as standards organisations.
"A lot of innovation is happening in open source," says Milinkovich, who says standards should come after new software inventions. "I always thought that innovating while doing the standards is a little confusing."
