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Eclipse grows beyond Java tools

Get to know Eclipse in Q&A with executive director

Mike Milinkovich is the executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, a nonprofit that oversees an open source community focused on application development tools. Founded by IBM in 2001, Eclipse became independently managed in 2004 and now boasts that more than 4 million people worldwide use Eclipse and Eclipse-based products. EBay, for example, used Eclipse to build much of its online architecture. Milinkovich this week discussed the Eclipse organization and its goals with Senior Writer Jon Brodkin.

What was the impetus for starting Eclipse?

Originally it was focused on tools for Java developers. The goal was to create an ecosystem for Java tooling which rivaled the depth and breadth of what Visual.net did for the [Microsoft framework] .NET. What Microsoft was doing with .NET was if you were using Microsoft platforms, there's one set of tools. IBM's strategy at the time was to do something similar for Java.

Why did IBM relinquish control of Eclipse?

What IBM started to observe was that although it was doing really well, it was hitting a glass ceiling because IBM's direct competitors did not want to get involved in a project they perceived as being too closely aligned with IBM. So in January 2004 the Eclipse Foundation was created, which is a separate, independent, not-for-profit entity that took over stewardship of the Eclipse community. That strategy really did work because a year after that a number of IBM's direct competitors, including BEA, Borland and Computer Associates, all joined the Eclipse Foundation and started building their tooling products on top of Eclipse.

What sorts of products are based on Eclipse's application development tools?

In the appdev space related to Java now, pretty much most of the products out there today for Java are based on Eclipse: SAP NetWeaver Studio, BEA WebLogic Workshop, all of the IBM Rational software.

Anything besides Java?

It's started to outgrow Java. We've been very successful with our C and C++ development toolset, and in the embedded and real-time space. The biggest advantage is the fact that it's a common platform that different tool vendors can pick up and implement their tools on top of, rather than starting from scratch. SAP uses Eclipse because it saves them an enormous amount of money building and supporting a basic tool infrastructure for building their NetWeaver Studio.

Who ends up using products based on Eclipse tools?

Most of the big companies, banks and insurance companies, healthcare organizations. Eclipse's biggest chunk of market share is in large enterprises [that use it to build internal applications], largely because it's used in so many products, it provides a common tooling platform.

What is the nature of the partnership with IBM these days?

Now that Eclipse is a completely independent organization, the governance of it is completely vendor neutral. So IBM doesn't get any extra votes because they were the original founder. Where they do get a little more weight, because in the projects themselves IBM is still the largest single patron; they're putting more resources into Eclipse projects. The entire Rational product line, the entire Lotus product line and a big chunk of WebSphere are all based on top of Eclipse technologies. They are heavily invested in Eclipse.

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How is Eclipse organized and how does it make money?

We have 17 people on staff. We have a dozen in Ottawa, we have four people in an office in Portland, Oregon, and one in Germany. What the Eclipse Foundation does is manage the infrastructure for all of the different companies and people involved in Eclipse to develop their projects. We host over 90 projects. Our business model is not-for-profit, we're funded through membership dues from the various companies. The highest level of membership is called strategic member, and they're paying up to US$250,000 a year, depending on the size of the company. We have 21 strategic members.

What's the benefit of paying that money?

They get a seat on the board and participation in the councils that govern projects. Those are the primary motivations.

What are your major projects for 2008?

The main thing changing at Eclipse is from a technical perspective; we're getting more and more into runtime projects. We started off in Java tools. With the next generation of the technology we became a platform for tool integration and you started to see a lot of modeling tools, performance analysis tools and the like. In the third generation we became an application integration platform originally on the desktop, but now we're seeing more and more people using the basic Eclipse runtime as a lightweight container for doing Java applications and middleware running on servers.

We have a new project now for doing a complete SOA [service-oriented architecture] runtime at Eclipse led by a company called Sopera in Germany. We have a project called Eclipse Link, which does object relational mapping from Java programs to relational databases. That's led by Oracle. And so we're starting to get a lot of momentum in the server side runtime.

What's significant about this?

With [our runtime program called] Equinox we have a component model that crosses devices, desktops, servers, across all of the major platforms that people are interested in Windows, Linux, Mac, and various forms of Unix. Why is that interesting? If you look at what else is out there today, .NET does have that same value proposition of crossing the tiers, they have Windows Mobile for devices, they have Windows desktop and Windows on the server. But they don't really have much of a cross-platform story.

What is your background?

I was recruited into this role from Oracle. I was a VP in their application server technology group. Before that I worked at WebGain, which was a tooling start-up during the dot-com heyday. I have both a technical and a business background.

What does your employee in Germany do?

He's mostly community development. He's out there talking about Eclipse and how companies in Europe can use Eclipse, recruiting new members. A big part of the value of Eclipse is meeting the other companies in the community doing interesting things, looking for business opportunities you can collaborate together on.

What kind of interest are you getting in Europe?

It's huge. On a per capita basis, Germany is probably our biggest country.