November 8th, 2007
Eclipse moving into applications
The Eclipse Foundation is moving into the application space, based on its existing development tools.
Director of marketing Ian Skerrett, interviewed from the Eclipse World conference in Reston, Virginia, said “We’re seeng more interest in people using Equinox on a server to build server-side applications, and also building applications on top of that.” Equinox is Eclipse’s implementation of the OSGi Alliance framework specification.
One example of this work is the Rich AJAX Platform (RAP) project Eclipse has created. “You build applications on that which are pushed to browsers.”
It means that Eclipse is slowly going “up the stack,” adding richer tools on older tools, and then enabling the creation of usable software with those tools. Over time it’s going to change attitudes toward Eclipse, and raise its public profile.
Skerrett learned all this in a community survey released for Eclipse World covering just how people are using the tool set. The short answer is it’s becoming a money spinner.
“A lot of IT solution providers, 75%, are using Eclipse to make money or save money. That’s telling. The IT solution provider community is embracing open source and Eclipse for economic reasons.
“We asked how much revenue was coming from Eclipse. Those who are using it to make money, close to 50% are making half their revenue from it. That was interesting, from a business dynamic perspective.”
Essentially, companies are using Eclipse tools to create server software for both Linux and Windows desktops. This is a counter-balance to recent stories claiming that the server market share of Linux is decreasing.
“Some 96% said they would increase or maintain their usage of Eclipse. It’s a strong loyal user base,” Skerrett concluded. All of which is going to make Eclipse even-more of a player in the Internet services marketplace.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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