Sun offers advice to Eclipse

NEW YORK – Days before a planned meeting of the organization overseeing the Eclipse Java tools platform, Java creator Sun Microsystems Inc. weighed in with its thoughts on Eclipse’s direction, reiterating its refusal to join Eclipse but expressing a desire for a friendly working relationship with the group.

Eclipse is an open-source platform for integrating software development tools. IBM Corp. created Eclipse’s core technology, which it turned over in 2001 to a consortium jointly created with several other vendors. IBM has until now been the group’s primary financial backer and most influential participant, but Eclipse’s board is looking to next week’s EclipseCon meeting in Anaheim, California as a turning point. The group is reorganizing as a nonprofit organization, with a new board and a funding model intended to demonstrate its independence from IBM.

Those changes led to speculation that Sun might involve itself more closely with Eclipse, but the company said Thursday in an open letter sent to the organization that it will stand by its decision not to join.

“All those involved in the meetings would agree that the sticking points in the discussion were not so much technical in nature as they were business-related,” Sun said. “Any entry criteria requiring that Sun abandon the NetBeans open source platform directly conflicts with the concept of choice and diversity, the very basis that gave Eclipse its beginning. If this condition were to change, we would be happy to reconsider.”

Eclipse has gained momentum as the platform of choice for the Java tools industry, but Sun dismissed as “a non-starter” the idea of abandoning its own NetBeans IDE (integrated development environment) in favor of an industry-wide single code base, presumably based on Eclipse. Instead, the company said it favors technical diversity with interoperability through standards-based development.

Still, the overall tone of Sun’s letter was relatively friendly, with the company pausing several times to praise Eclipse for its positive contributions to the Java community. Sun said it hopes to work with Eclipse to insure real-world interoperability across different IDEs.

Sun seized the opportunity in its letter to offer Eclipse its “advice and suggestions,” such as:

— ensure that the group’s new director is impartial;

— diversify the project’s staffers beyond the IBMers currently comprising Eclipse’s majority;

— and be willing to pay for intellectual property contributions from outside platform vendors.

Sun later took the chance to tout some of the technologies in its own NetBeans software.