January 18th, 2007
Eclipse wants you to know it has friends
To those of you who believe open protocols are more important than open source, the Eclipse Foundation has a message.
They agree with you.
Mike Milinkovich, the foundation's executive director, said the group has long worked closely with standards bodies such as the Java Community Process (JCP), Object Management Group (OMG) and the OSGi Alliance.
Its recent announcement that Eclipse has joined the groups follows "a great deal of interaction" that has already produced tangible results:
- Eclipse Equinox Version 3.2 is actually an implementation of OSGi Version 4.
- Eclipse plug-ins are all based on JCo 2.0.
- Eclipse actually validated Version 2 of the Unified Modeling Language specification, before the organization was formally launched.
The announcement January 12 followed a year spent creating procedures for cooperation, identifying when an Eclipse member would be wearing what hat, for instance, and getting formal approvals of membership agreements, things like that.
So the news is that this is not news, I suggested. "We wanted to recognize the fact that we have used these organizations' specifications. They have name recognition in the industry, and we wanted to make that public," he responded.
In other words, yes. But that's also very good news indeed.
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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