Friday, March 24, 2006

IBM mulls support charges for Eclipse developers

Source: Channel Register

Summary:
IBM, which helped create the open source platform in 2001, is to pilot a support program for developers using the organization's tools plus commercial offerings running on Eclipse, such as IBM's Rational suite.

Details are yet to be finalized, but IBM told The Register that the services offered are likely to differ from IBM's support for Linux and Geronimo in the run-time world.

IBM's decision to offer support for Eclipse reflects the open source environment's growing presence among businesses - 30 per cent of enterprises and 25 per cent or so of small and medium businesses (SMBs) use Eclipse, analyst Evans Data Corp (EDC) estimates.

But it will have an interesting challenge in tackling price objections. This week at EclipseCon in Santa Clara, California, EDC said it had found little appetite for paid support from Eclipse users. Just over 30 per cent expect support to be free while a third said if they would pay anything at all, it must be less than $100.

No comments: