The Value of Eclipse for the Open Source Community

Source: B-EYE-Network

Summary:
Twenty years ago, virtually all companies selling networking products sold products based on proprietary protocols. These vendors were hoping to dominate the networking market by locking out other vendors who did not support their protocols.

Among these vendors were then-LAN software giant Novell and Microsoft. What none foresaw was the emergence of a vendor-neutral standards body, the Internet Engineering Task Force. The IETF was developing a set of protocols that would supplant the current protocols of these vendors, as well as their dreams of network domination.

Today, another open community is devoted to developing a vendor-neutral and open platform, this time for application development. Eclipse is an open source community whose projects are focused on providing a vendor-neutral open development platform and application frameworks for building software.

The potential for Eclipse-based projects is huge for numerous reasons, particularly for the business intelligence community. Eclipse itself also has huge potential. It is a significant project of projects, funded and supported by many of the biggest names in business intelligence and business software. The most obvious and prominent Eclipse project related to business intelligence is the Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) project.