Eclipse Galileo is out now. It is remarkable: 33 projects and 24 million lines of code, according to the press release. Perhaps the two biggest features in this release are support for Mac Cocoa - in order words, proper Mac support - and PHP development tools. All open source, all free.
Unsurprisingly, Eclipse appears to be the most popular Java development tool, and if you extend that to IDEs based on Eclipse, its dominance is overwhelming. Its obvious rival, Netbeans, has improved greatly in the last few years and may be better for some purposes; but it looks unlikely to catch Eclipse, and the impact of Oracle's impending acquisition of Sun is unknown.
Eclipse has also influenced other development tools, forcing vendors to offer more for free and to improve their extensibility. You can see this effect in Visual Studio, for example, with its Express editions and both technical and licensing enhancements to its extensibility in recent times. Microsoft may say that this would have happened anyway, but I am doubtful. Eclipse changed the game.
Still, there is something that I've always found intriguing about Eclipse, which may be a weakness in its business model (if a free platform can have such a thing). I put this to Executive Director Mike Milinkovich and he responded robustly, which I like because it usually means I've asked a good question.
Eclipse is a a tools platform, not an IDE, and member companies build their own products based on the shared platform. Examples are Adobe with Flex Builder, IBM with Rational Application Developer, Zend with Zend Studio, and Embarcadero with JBuilder. Each of these companies has a dilemma. The more they invest in the shared platform, the more they collectively benefit by getting features that they do not have to build on their own; but the better the shared platform gets, the more difficult it is to differentiate and sell their commercial products. I asked Milinkovich about this tension and he interrupted me:
That's not a tension, that's exactly the way Eclipse is designed to work. That is the Eclipse business model. Our licensing model and our business model are geared around the notion that we're building an open source platform which then people build products on top and differentiate in the marketplace based on what they do on the proprietary side.
Although Milinkovich says it is "not a tension", Embarcadero CEO Wayne Williams complained about this very thing, telling me that IBM is now pulling back from investment in Eclipse and reserving the best new features for its own products - which, whatever the truth of the matter, IBM has every right to do.
An additional factor is the difference between vendors like Google, which has an Eclipse plug-in for App Engine, but is only concerned to promote its platform; and those like Embarcadero whose business is selling tools. Vendors like Google can improve Eclipse without any threat to their business.
Eclipse is wildly popular, but came last in a recent Software Development Platform survey of developer satisfaction by Evans Data. To be fair, all the products won a reasonably good rating, so we should not infer that Eclipse is poor; it is not. I can understand, though, why some member companies may be happy to see Eclipse rated as good, but not too good, giving them space for their Eclipse-based products; and if this is the case, it may limit the extent to which Eclipse is likely to improve.
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Microsoft has been giving away compilers and IDEs for ten years longer than Eclipse has existed.
If there's one thing GPL people are genuinely free with, it's attribution to themselves.
Microsoft has been "giving away compilers" in the sense of giving away highly restricted and limited versions.
And GCC has existed a lot longer than Eclipse.
And for most of the time that Microsoft has had their "express" editions, the EULA has forbidden the development of plugins, and they have sent cease-and-desist notices to people who don't follow the rules - because the ability to have those plugins was supposed to be a compelling reason to buy the non-free editions.
It's naive to believe that Microsoft offers their free compilers for any reason other than avoiding developers defecting to competing platforms that happen to have free tools available.
Sure, given that I hate Eclipse, I'm grateful for the Express editions of visual studio, but I can at least appreciate the competition that has encouraged Microsoft to give me stuff. I may not use Linux and I'm no fan of Eclipse - but anyone who thinks that competition doesn't have any effect on the market isn't paying attention.