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Oracle to unify Sun and Eclipse?
When Oracle joined the Eclipse board nearly seven years ago, it was with the stated intent to unify Sun Microsystems and Eclipse.
Assuming that their purchase goes through, they will have the power to actually do this. Will they?
Discussion
If it helps with Oracles EPS, they will.
Do you really think that because in November 12, 2002 Oracle joined the Eclipse Foundation and said they would like to unify Netbeans and Eclipse that they should do it today ?
I think it is impossible because Eclipse is still under IBM control and Netbeans will certainly merge with other Oracle tools. Unifying Netbeans and Eclipse would not generate any revenue for Oracle while using Netbeans with other Oracle tools could be profitable. Eclipse failed to be monetized therefore also failed to unify Netbeans and Eclipse. In 2002 I was already in the Eclipse ecosystem and we all dreamed that it would bring a better future for all of us.This Oracle posts was published at the same time in 2002. The reality is that it has not been a real success for many reasons and one of them is the Eclipse foundation bad management.
Exactly what bad management are you referring to?
I was on the Eclipse Board at the time all this happened. Our position to Oracle and to Sun was that if Sun joined Eclipse, we would change the name to something else and that Sun would get exactly the same rights and privileges as anyone else.
In the end, for various reasons that were very diplomatically explained, Sun chose not to join Eclipse.
I was one of the Board members speaking with Oracle's rep about this at the time. Speaking personally, I do not see how Eclipse could have done anything different than they did.
It would be fantastic if they contribute resources to getting Eclipse for (Open)Solaris X86 (32 and 64 bit) into the upstream Eclipse.
Hello Rod,
There is an unofficial OpenSolaris X86 build instruction available for Eclipse 3.4.2. Other than a few issues like xulrunner not working it works pretty decently. It is the SDK release (not platform). See more at http://code.google.com/p/solipse/wiki/BasicHowToBuild
Please note that this project does not seem to have a build itself so you would have to do it yourself.
If you are interested in a build then you can write to me ahti at codehoop dott com and I'll upload it to somewhere.
Ahti
Thanks for your post, I was aware of the Solipse work and also the Eclipse Ganymede version in the OpenSolaris IPS repo since 2008.11. I'm not sure how these two versions relate to each other or if even if they do. Thanks for the offer of the build.
What I really meant was it would be even better if there was no need for these ports or special build patches, but instead necessary changes went into the upstream version at www.eclipse.org. Then, just like the Sparc Solaris version, an x86/AMD64 version would be available with each new plaform build or milestone at eclipse.org and it would be possible to apply incremental updates through the P2 system.
There was a Solaris X86 version at eclipse.org a few years ago but it disappeared.
Since Solaris on x86 may become relatively more widespread than Sparc in the current climate or if Oracle de-emaphasises Sparc it would be great to have eclipse supported for both Solaris platforms at eclipse.org.
Perhaps Oracle may also put some support into the remaining bugs on the X86 version such as the XULrunner issue.
Wow - as of 3.5M7 there's a Solaris x86 GTK version at eclipse.org !
Hopefully there will be a 64-bit version in future too.
I'm stunned.