An industry "standard" is only valuable when it hits critical mass. What makes Eclipse such a phenomenon is how quickly that happened. Adobe Systems, Borland Software, SAP and BEA Systems are among the dozens of companies that now base their IDEs on Eclipse, and coders have built modules enabling Eclipse development for nearly every language and platform.
Users cite Eclipse's permissive licensing as a key factor in its rapid adoption. The Eclipse Public License was explicitly designed to be business-friendly. It allows developers of derivative works to incorporate Eclipse code into commercial products and to keep any changes they make proprietary. For ISVs that make their living off Eclipse, that's criticalboth in enabling their own business models and in encouraging other companies to adopt Eclipse, broadening the market.
Custom development firm Instantiations, Portland, Ore., is a longtime IBM partner that used to create add-ons for IBM's Visual Age for Java development environment. Invited to one of IBM's first Eclipse briefings, before the project went public, it liked the concept and shifted its focus.
"We're pretty entrepreneurial, and we're opportunistic. After we got some experience with Eclipse, we looked at each other and said, 'If this works, every time some other large vendor puts their code base on top of Eclipse, it's going to open up a new market for us,' " said Mike Taylor, CEO of Instantiations.
At the time, the decision was a gamble. But over the past five years, Eclipse has toppled its rivals like dominos. As companies such as SAS adopt Eclipse as the foundation of their development, they become potential customers for Eclipse ISVs (and, indeed, SAS is a heavy user of Instantiations' Eclipse add-ons).
Instantiations' revenue grew 100 percent from 2003 to 2005 and recently ranked 51st on a list of Oregon's fastest-growing private companies. "Our growth was pretty dramatic, and it was primarily Eclipse-based," Taylor said.
In addition to its acclaimed licensing approach, Eclipse's other edge is its community. Plenty of open-source projects thrive because they attract smart, passionate developers; Linux is the canonical example. Eclipse's unusual talent lies in luring commercial rivals to work together comfortably as productive contributors.
The Eclipse Foundation's membership roster is a listing of nearly every major software makermany competitors of IBM, the organization's founderand includes Oracle, CA, Borland, Compuware, Mercury, BEA and so on. Participants say IBM's decision to legally separate itself from Eclipse in 2004 and hand control over to the independent, nonprofit Eclipse Foundation was critical in boosting Eclipse's credibility.
"Nobody wants to hang a big part of their future on IBM because IBM is a big, 500-pound gorilla," said Rich Main, director of Java development environments at SAS, Cary, N.C. SAS began eyeing Eclipse in early 2002 but waited another year to join, until the wheels were in motion for IBM to surrender control. "There were a lot of major players staying on the sidelines because they perceived Eclipse as being an IBM-controlled organization," he said.
NEXT: The Eclipse community
