Eclipse Platform

Eclipse Foundation executive director Mike Milinkovich (pictured) was recently quoted as saying, "If Microsoft wants to embrace OSS, they should first of all consider following the open source norms. They've got a couple of licenses they put out there recently and by all reports people are saying they are not bad licenses. I think they should consider going through the OSI [Open Source Initiative] approval process, and I think they should be using those licenses to get OSS code out there."

Milinkovich was responding to news that Microsoft executive Jason Matusow had claimed that open source was not as open as its supporters might want it to be at IDG's OSBC conference. Milinkovich had, earlier in the year, spoken at length with SYS-CON publishing director Jeremy Geelan about a wide range of topics in an exclusive interview.

Interesting outtakes from that interview included:

"If you are a developer interested in desktop Java development and you have not yet looked at the Eclipse Rich Client Platform, you really need to. Eclipse RCP offers a great platform for developing managed applications with a rich user experience. It's doing more to generate interest in Java on the desktop than any other initiative."

"Eclipse is not about supplanting commercial opportunity. It's about creating it. It's a common misconception that Eclipse is about building tools. That is not the primary focus of our community. The main objective of Eclipse is to create a universal development platform made up of frameworks and well-constructed APIs. Then we provide exemplary and extensible tools to demonstrate the use of the frameworks. But the point of this work is to build a platform on which vendors can implement their products. The tools are extensible so they can be further customized to meet the specific needs of commercial platforms."

"Java is a great programming language. But the idea that Java should be constrained to only fit one style of application and one way of doing things is just lame. SWT has never been about supplanting Swing. It has been about providing a realistic and high-performance alternative for people whose application requirements demand it. We believe that there are probably many more Swing applications being built with Eclipse than any other toolset."

Milinkovich was also interviewed by Eclipse Developer's Journal editor Bill Dudney on SYS-CON.TV at this year's JavaOne Conference in San Francisco.