Eclipse chief cites ‘secret sauce’ for success

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Eclipse can attribute its success as an open source tools platform to a "secret sauce" enabling multiple organizations to work together, said Eclipse Foundation Executive Director Mike Milinkovich, in a keynote speech at the EclipseWorld 2006 conference on Thursday.

The foundation seeks to build "the universal development platform," Milinkovich said.

"I think really a big part of the secret sauce of Eclipse is about balance," with participants building shared tools and frameworks and then developing a profitable ecosystem of commercial products on top of the Eclipse platform, Milinkovich said. Unlike the Sun Microsystems-led NetBeans open source platform, Eclipse offers a level playing field for participants, he said.

"The real answer of what I want to talk about today is I think Eclipse has discovered, perhaps invented, the secret sauce for getting organizations together that want to build open source. My dream for Eclipse is this becomes an institution that lasts long after I'm gone," Milinkovich said.

Eclipse previously has cited downloads well into the tens of millions.

Eclipse offers to all participants a Darwinian system of plug-in-based software extensions, with some plug-ins succeeding and others dying off, Milinkovich said. Participants each are on equal footing in the Eclipse process, with features governance, quality, process and predictability, he said.

Milinkovich noted the organization has set its sights squarely on Microsoft in the tools arena. "Eclipse has done extremely well in becoming the premier alternative to Microsoft," in terms of size and scope of tools for its platform, said Milinkovich.

He presented multiple stages of embracing open source, with the first stage being denial. "Everyone here knows companies that are in denial about the impact that open source is having," said Milinkovich. He stressed he was not speaking just of Microsoft but added lawyers at corporations also have been skeptical.

Subsequent stages include a beginning user stage; a collaboration stage, in which a user starts to give back to the community; a champion stage, with more involvement in projects; a strategist stage, in which a business is built around open source, and an aggressive stage, in which participants seek to leverage maximum competitive advantage via open source.

Eclipse offers stable release cycles, which boosts the ability of companies to build products on top of the platform, said Milinkovich. In June, the foundation followed this strategy with Callisto, which featured the simultaneous release of 10 different Eclipse technologies.

An Eclipse user in the audience shared Milinkovich's enthusiasm, with one reservation.

"I love Eclipse, I use it everyday. I think it’s a fantastic tool for development," said William Blinn, software engineer at Tamale, which builds an organizational and collaboration system for financial professionals. Eclipse, Blinn said, "makes everything so easy."

However, the Eclipse platform still could use improvement in terms of memory consumption, according to Blinn. "It's kind of heavy in terms of memory," Blinn said. "If you load up the IDE and put a couple of big projects in it, it kind of loads your system up."