IBM Continues Its Support for Eclipse

Source: eWeek

Summary:
SANTA CLARA, Calif.—IBM on March 21 announced that it is starting a support offering for developers using Eclipse as their primary development environment.

Officials said the pilot program is aimed at customers who want their development teams using both open-source Eclipse and commercial Eclipse-based tools such as IBM Rational software. IBM's services and support team will assist developers and their managers working in mixed software development environments. IBM made the announcement at the EclipseCon 2006 conference here.

In 2001, IBM launched Eclipse as an open-source project after contributing more than $40 million in technology. Then at the first EclipseCon in February 2004, Eclipse became an independent entity, with Mike Milinkovich as executive director.

However, IBM continues to wield a great deal of power within the Eclipse organization. For instance, reinforcing its commitment to PHP, IBM and Zend Technologies are contributing code to the newly created PHP IDE subproject of the Eclipse Tools project. IBM and Zend have jointly developed a fully extensible PHP Development Environment framework.

"By maintaining a strong commitment to open source, encouraging innovation and engendering community growth, IBM's strategy of investing in open source has planted seeds that will continue to positively impact growth and pay future dividends," John Kellerman, manager of Eclipse Strategy at IBM, said in a statement.