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Expanding the Eclipse Ecosystem
Amidst explosive growth, the Eclipse Foundation continues to break new ground in its bid to establish a community of successful open source projects
The Editors of Java Pro

March 16, 2005

In its first year of existence as a not-for-profit corporation, the Eclipse Foundation has experienced explosive growth that has exceeded the community's expectations by leaps and bounds. This fact was punctuated in early March by the huge success of the EclipseCon 2005 conference, where the foundation's executive director, Mike Milinkovich, seemed to be everywhere. Milinkovich took a few moments out of his busy conference schedule to meet with the editors of Java Pro in an exclusive interview to discuss the conference, the recent announcement of five member companies moving up to the strategic developer level, some exciting new technologies for the platform, and where the Eclipse Foundation is headed.

Java Pro: What's your impression of the EclispseCon event?

Mike Milinkovich: I can't imagine how we could have done better. We sold it out. It's a home run in every way you can measure. Everybody I've talked to has been very happy with the programs. There's been lots of great talks, the keynotes have been interesting, the buzz is good.

JP: Now that you've hit this home run—not that we're coming to an ending of sorts—but what's next for you? That is, how about the Eclipse Foundation in general and its momentum?

Milinkovich: I think the big piece of news is the announcement on the five new strategic developers.

JP: Now does that mean five new projects?

Milinkovich: Scapa [Technologies] is already a project lead, BEA, Borland, Computer Associates, and Sybase are each proposing one, so that's four new projects. BEA is also assuming a co-lead position for our Web Tools Project, which is kind of a nice situation where Web Tools will be co-led by BEA and by a gentleman from ObjectWeb, which is an open source project for the JOnAS Application Server. Web Tools now is being supported by JBoss, by JOnAS, by IBM, and by BEA, so it clearly has strong momentum for open source and commercial behind it.

The addition of these strategic developers really shows that we've established an independent identity, and that companies like BEA and Borland feel comfortable coming to Eclipse is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. It means they feel comfortable getting here, so now we're more independent, and I think that issue now is completely behind us. It shows that the sort of economic or business model for the foundation is working. When you start something new, you don't necessarily know whether or not it will work. That is true of Eclipse on many different dimensions. Lots of new ideas are being tried at Eclipse, in our government model, in our funding model, and so on. We're really pleased to see that they're taking off and gaining momentum.

JP: One company we spoke with here said the combination of commercial support behind an open source platform was something that really appealed to the enterprise customer in particular.

Milinkovich: I can believe that. You know enterprise customers at some level are being paid to be risk averse, and to the degree to which you can demonstrate that adopting an open source tool or technology is a safe bet, then the more likely they are to do it. I think that the commercial work for Eclipse and the work that the foundation does to make sure that our IT is in good shape, that combination makes Eclipse a very safe choice for people who want to adopt our technology.