Eclipse Celebrates Second Anniversary

• Universal Tools Technology Achieves Growth and Recognition
• Early R3 Stream Stable Downloads Available Now

RALEIGH, NC--November 25, 2003--Today, the Eclipse consortium, founded in November 2001 by Borland, IBM, MERANT, QNX Software Systems, Red Hat, and SUSE celebrated the second anniversary of the open projects that created the universal Eclipse tools platform. Since its inception, interest in Eclipse has grown at unprecedented rates - including over 18 million download requests from tools users worldwide. Tools and technology providers, and consumers including Individuals, commercial, research and educational projects now form the expanding ecosystem of Eclipse.

Since its introduction, Eclipse has been recognized with more than eight top industry awards and honors. Open technology and commercial offerings associated with Eclipse have also grown at an unprecedented rate for tools technology. Independent websites like http://eclipse-plugins.2y.net track over 405 projects that relate to Eclipse technology, plus there are numerous offerings from the supporting 49 member companies that form the Eclipse Consortium.

In the past two years, using Eclipse itself, and through an automated open build process that has provided over 700 nightly incremental updates, the Eclipse open projects have delivered two major versions and a dozen stable platform releases culminating in current Eclipse release R2.1.2. Early stream stable builds of Eclipse R3 became available October 10, 2003. Downloads are available without charge from http://www.eclipse.org.

"While our sights are set on future versions of the Eclipse Platform, we have provided several useful enhancements to the R2 code base," said John Wiegand, Eclipse Project Lead. "We are working with the larger Eclipse community that is now releasing plug-ins based on Eclipse R2 and collaborating on new features in R3."

Eclipse now hosts seventeen open technology projects within a structure that focuses on the base platform, tools, research and development, and web application-oriented tools. Technologies from Eclipse address developer needs through the entire lifecycle of development and project deployment. Eclipse based tools support a large number of development languages, prepare applications for deployment platforms ranging from embedded devices to large servers and middleware, and have been translated into many European and Asian national languages.

From Founding Members of Eclipse.org:"Eclipse has been an unqualified success for the SUSE community," said Juergen Geck, CTO, SUSE LINUX. "We've now fully integrated Eclipse into SUSE LINUX - enabling our partner community to take full advantage of its capabilities. Now, by enabling -- and building -- Eclipse plug-ins in this fully integrated environment, customers can get comprehensive support from tools vendors to address all their development objectives."

"Until Eclipse, there was no unifying development platform in the embedded market," said Dan Dodge, president of QNX Software Systems and a steward of the Eclipse consortium. "With our leadership on the C development tools project, companies can now standardize on a common platform for both their embedded and enterprise development requirements, and even have seamless integration between tools in these previously disparate worlds. QNX is extremely proud to be a part of the success and adoption of Eclipse."

"The success and proliferation of Eclipse technologies is an indicator that Open Source software has incredible demand in the enterprise marketplace," said Karen Bennet, vice president of Tools and Applications Development at Red Hat. "Eclipse technologies are key to the development of standards-based applications that allow organizations to deploy open source solutions from the desktop to the mainframe."

"The community's acceptance, participation and response to Eclipse has been remarkable since its launch in late 2001, far surpassing our expectations," said Lee R. Nackman, vice president of Desktop Development Tools and CTO of IBM Rational Software. "As the IBM and Rational Software development teams continue our contributions, we are dedicated to the Eclipse vision and poised for exciting growth and success."

EclipseCon, a new technical conference, will take place February 2-5, 2004 in Anaheim, CA. Produced and managed by Eclipse consortium member the Object Management Group, EclipseCon brings together the Eclipse ecosystem: developers, software architects, technical managers, systems integrators, thought leaders, and other software development tools producers and consumers using or interested in learning about Eclipse technology. Learn more about EclipseCon at http://www.eclipsecon.org.

Full details of the Eclipse consortium, open-source community, the Eclipse Platform and royalty-free downloads are available at http://www.eclipse.org.

Some components of Eclipse may be governed by license terms other than the CPL.

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