From the ‘Time Flies’ files:
The Eclipse project officially turns 10 today. Time sure does fly. It seem like just yesterday that I was writing about the fifth anniversary of Eclipse.
Eclipse started out as just an open source IDE that was open sourced by IBM, that’s the genesis. The broader Eclipse effort really took off in January of 2004 with the creation of the Eclipse Foundation which has become home to more projects than I can count. When it comes to developer tools and tooling, Eclipse has become the defacto go too organization in the open source world.
It’s the place where competitors collaborate on code. It’s also not just a bastion of free code for freedom’s sake, it’s also the basis of many commercial products. I’ve been told time again by Eclipse and it’s supporters that the Eclipse way is all about making open source projects that can then be commericalized in some way by members (or others).
Eclipse isn’t just about Java either as it was five or ten years ago. I’m a big fan of the PDT Project, which delivers PHP Developer Tools and is the basis of the Zend Studio IDE.
Another thing that has changed in the last five years is the fact that Sun is gone and Oracle has always been a strong supporter of Eclipse. While I haven’t seen wholesale shift of Netbeans developers to Eclipse, Oracle is clearly more friendly than Sun had been toward Eclipse and that’s a good thing for Eclipse over all.
The fact that Eclipse has survived 10 years and has become more relevant than ever is a testament to both IBM for its early vision and the strength of the open source model for development.
Happy Birthday Eclipse!