HP Joins Eclipse, Supports Open-Source IDE

By Richard Karpinski, INW
iApplianceWeb
(09/26/02, 08:14:46 PM EDT)

Palo Alto, Ca. -- Eclipse.org just got another significant vote of confidence from the computer industry, with the addition of Hewlett-Packard Corp. as a board member of the open source consortium.

The Eclipse project is aiming to create an open-source "framework" that lets third-party vendors "plug in" specialty development tools. The idea is to let developers work within a single framework -- including things like user interface and shared services like source-code management or debugging -- for all their development.

Today, developers typically use a hodge-podge of tools and editors to do their developing.

IBM founded the Eclipse project by contributing technology it had been developing under an open-source license. A similar project, dubbed NetBeans, was hatched by Sun Microsystems based on technology it acquired and then released to the open-source community.

All of these efforts, at least in part, target Microsoft, which has its own soup-to-nuts tools strategy in .Net and Visual Studio.

The appointment of HP to the Eclipse board is a strong win for the group, which despite some success in attracting developers and users is still in its early stages. HP executive Michael Rank will join the Eclipse board.

HP is unique in that it is strongly supporting both Java-based (in part via Eclipse) and .Net-based server and development tools as part of its broad hardware and services strategy. It has also cut with both BEA and Microsoft .Net to support both the Java and Windows development environments.