Eclipsing
The Java Tools Landscape
Last
week, IBM capped its investment in Eclipse, an open development
platform, with a conference, EclipseCon, designed to provide a
status report, a forum for discussions, and an opportunity to move
Eclipse from under IBM’s founding stewardship to its own,
independent organization.
With
nearly 60 members, Eclipse is clearly ready to be on its own, to
provide leadership and set standards for the development of
interoperable Java tools. The
newly chartered group includes strategic partners (who commit funds
and resources of $250,000 to $500,000 per year), HP, IBM, Intel,
MontaVista, QNX, SAP, and strategic consumer Serena Software.
It also includes nearly 40 Add-In Providers.
Associates (publishers, educators, etc.) will also be invited
to join.
IBM fellow Grady Booch notes that the open standard IDE of
Eclipse includes many collaborative features.
IBM’s WebSphere, Rational, Lotus and Tivoli products all
support Eclipse.
Notably absent at the newly independent Eclipse is Sun
Microsystems, the inventor of Java and its owner and steward. Sun recently held its own tools standard conference, the Java
Tools Community (JTC) and while it says that it might be possible
for it to join Eclipse in the future, the reasons it gave for not
being able to join Eclipse seem to ring false.
Sun wants to maintain its own NetBeans and its Project Rave
development strategy; Sun seems to believe that joining Eclipse
would mean abandoning NetBeans.
The Eclipse community has been quick to point out that no
Eclipse member is being asked to abandon his own products and
strategies, pointing out, for example, that Eclipse member Borland
will continue to support its JBuilder product.
The real issue, of course, will be interoperability.
It’s at the heart of the Eclipse Foundation’s mission and
it’s why it’s important for Sun to either join Eclipse or insure
that the efforts by the JTC will interoperate with Eclipse.
Someday, one hopes, Sun will figure out that market success
depends upon the economies of scale and those economics rest firmly
on interoperability.
Much of the dissent, one thinks, has a deeper basis than NetBeans
or Eclipse. Sun, having
invented Java and seen it widely accepted, seems amazed that it has
been relatively unsuccessful in turning that success into monetary
return for Sun. I
don’t want to debate the whole issue of whether Java is Open
Source or not; let us say that it can’t really be Open Source as
long as Sun controls it, but that it behaves like Open Source in
many ways. Sun might be
better off to let Java truly be Open Source, held in an independent
foundation, and then follow an available model for monetizing
software or services value on top of that Open Source model.
In that case, the value of joining Eclipse (and its
independence) might be more obvious.
Of course, no one wants to limit diversity in application
development, but Sun, like other systems vendors, isn’t in the
applications development business.
It provides infrastructure.
If their argument is that we need diverging (and
non-interoperable) infrastructure to permit the optimal development
of applications, they’ll need to make that case.
Software development, over time, tends to converge in the
direction of broadly held standards.
Sun wants Eclipse members to realize that their primary
competition is Microsoft and .Net.
I think that there are no members of the Java-focused
community that don’t have that clearly in mind.
Sun can argue for standards and interoperability, but the
fact of the matter is that Sun forces Java developers and users to
be interoperable with the JCP (Java Community Process) which Sun
controls. Perhaps the
Java world has decided that this is as much control as they will
cede to Sun.
(back to top)
