Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, used last year's EclipseCon conference to criticize Microsoft's long-time lack of participation in the open-source community. Microsoft, he said, sent representatives to the conference every year who always agreed that the two camps should set up a meeting. Once the conferences ended, however, Microsoft didn't respond to Eclipse Foundation, requests to schedule a get-together, he noted.
That scenario is likely to change this year as Sam Ramji, director of Microsoft's Open Source Software Lab is slated to give a keynote speech Wednesday morning at EclipseCon 2008. This year's conference got underway Monday in San Jose.
Ramji already has confirmed that Microsoft and Eclipse are collaborating on some projects, but he declined to disclose any details of those efforts.
Milinkovich also declined to provide details of any forthcoming announcement, noting that Eclipse will leave it up to Microsoft to disclose any agreement. Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment on its Eclipse plans.
While Microsoft is unlikely to open source any core parts of its Visual Studio IDE, analysts said that the vendor could opt to offer its Visual Studio TFS (Team Foundation Server) to the community. Analysts also suggested that Microsoft may decide to work with Eclipse on its next-generation modeling language, which is slated to be part of Visual Studio 2010, code-named "Oslo."
Greg DeMichillie, an analyst at independent research firm Directions on Microsoft, said he would be "stunned" if Microsoft announced that any parts of the Visual Studio IDE would be available as open source. DeMichillie said that the company may be developing technology that would allow Eclipse plug-ins to work in Visual Studio.
"That would further establish Visual Studio as the default IDE," he noted.
DeMichillie noted that Microsoft could be announcing that it is collaborating with Eclipse in an application modeling effort during an EclipseCon session scheduled to discuss the future of Eclipse and Visual Studio 2010.
"Microsoft has been trying for the better part of the past four or five years get into application modeling," he said. "[It] has sort of been scrambling to fill out modeling as part of its product line-up. The general consensus has been that Microsoft really just doesn't believe in modeling to begin with, so most of its modeling products have been halfhearted."
Citing the effort to include a modeling language in the next generation IDE, DeMichillie said that Oslo marks a return by Microsoft to a focus on modeling. "Maybe they have a deal with Eclipse to support whatever this new modeling language is," he noted.
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