In a new twist to the on-again, off-again friendship between Sun Microsystems and the Eclipse Foundation, the latter has now decided to contribute code to the Eclipse foundation. According to Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation, Inc., a developer from Sun Microsystems has committed code to the Eclipse tree... |
 In a new twist to the on-again, off-again friendship between Sun Microsystems and the Eclipse Foundation, the latter has now decided to contribute code to the Eclipse foundation. According to Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation, Inc., a developer from Sun Microsystems has committed code to the Eclipse tree. The code is reportedly required to get Eclipse running on x86-based Solaris.
When you think of it, this just makes really good sense. The Solaris x86 team is working to enable one of the most popular development tools for its platform. As they should," said Milinkovich in a blog post entitled "Hell Froze Over?" "I am very happy to see that sound business decisions are replacing rhetoric in the relationship between Sun and Eclipse. This is a small step forward, but it is a very tangible and pragmatic one," he said.
IBM spun off Eclipse into its own Foundation three years ago. IBM has a seat on the board, but not a permanent one or one with the power of veto - all the strategic members are equal. A bid for Sun to join the Eclipse foundation was laid on the table in late 2003. The idea was to find a way to coalesce the two open-source projects under a single entity. However, Sun declined the offer in December that year, stating that it had decided with Eclipse that overcoming the technical and organizational differences between the two groups would adversely affect current participants in the NetBeans and Eclipse projects.
The new decision from Sun comes in the wake of several developers, working with the solaris platform, complaining about the difficulty in getting Eclipse up and running on a new architecture. Thomas Strömberg, a 27-yr old Swedish geek from Roswell, GA, was quoted as saying on his blog back in March this year, "Eclipse, my favorite programming editor, does not officially support Solaris x86. This is quite sad, because I’ve decided to run Solaris 11 beta (”Nevada” b35) on a machine at work. I spent quite a while today trying to solve this in the “right” way, but ended up just needing to get the job done and hacking it. It seemed to me awfully shameful that a “java” app such as Eclipse was such a pain in the ass to get up and running on a new architecture."
In an interview two weeks ago, James Gosling, creator of Java, had remarked that "the Eclipse endorsement of the Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) destroyed that organisation's interoperability story." It's a toolkit based on the Windows API and getting it to run on other platforms is problematic, he said. Ironically, according to Milinkovich, the SWT is exactly the component Sun is currently helping Eclipse out with.
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