Home » General (non-technical) » Eclipse Foundation » IBM, Sun, NB, and Eclipse ?
| IBM, Sun, NB, and Eclipse ? [message #58127] |
Thu, 19 March 2009 13:10  |
Eclipse User |
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Any thoughts on the relationship between Eclipse and NetBeans, if IBM
does acquire Sun?
Will there be a (formal) discussion of this at EclipseCon?
Charlie
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| Re: IBM, Sun, NB, and Eclipse ? [message #58174 is a reply to message #58127] |
Thu, 19 March 2009 14:34  |
| Eclipse User |
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Charlie Kelly wrote:
> Any thoughts on the relationship between Eclipse and NetBeans, if IBM
> does acquire Sun?
NetBeans? Swing? What are those? :-) How much of the Sun can you
typically see after a total Eclipse?
Seriously though, if the rumored deal passes anti-trust muster (not at
all clear), NetBeans best hope will be to have its sale to a third party
be made an anti-trust condition of the deal. Even then, it's just going
to wither and die at its new home. Great news for plugin vendors - half
the investment, twice the available market.
Resolving the Swing vs SWT NIH situation will be a little bit more,
shall we say, "interesting" since there are so many customers using
Swing. With competitive bashing is no longer an issue, there will be no
point in investing in both, but resolving the situation is going to be
messy and expensive.
The one big positive will be that it should put an end to the petty Java
infighting that these two have engaged in for so many years. All hail
our glorious overlords! :-)
Tom
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| Re: IBM, Sun, NB, and Eclipse ? [message #58245 is a reply to message #58197] |
Fri, 20 March 2009 08:40 |
| Eclipse User |
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Vlad,
Comments below.
Vlad Varnica wrote:
> Hi Charlie and Tom,
>
> The only current problem I see is that the Java platform and Eclipse
> Framework were never monetized.
Perhaps like the proverbial double-edged sword, this was also a key to
their success.
> I think Eclipse Foundation is spending too much time on adopting too
> many small open sources projects and not on providing a long term
> stable frameworks on which existing vendors could leverage to generate
> revenues.
The Eclipse Foundation doesn't adopt open source projects, it simply
hosts them. Therefore the Foundation itself is not responsible for
providing long term stable frameworks, rather the projects themselves
are directly responsible for that. The Foundation can only encourage
and promote this point of view, and I think it's doing that as well as
is possible given that it's driven by what's effectively, from a
Foundation control point of view, an entirely volunteer developer base.
>
> The problem is that many companies believe that the community will
> improve open source plugins
I know I improve my (EMF) open source plugins.
> and that it is a good long term investment to select these open source
> plugins
I think selecting EMF is a good long term investment.
> and not to buy existing vendor solutions.
So I see no problem for someone selecting EMF. I see what you describe
as potentially a problem for vendors competing with EMF. Is that your
point?
> The dilema having too many small open source projects is that there
> are just one to five part-time commiters and the needed quality for
> professional software is never reached.
So the old adage, buyer beware still applies, even for free things. An
important point though is that if your vendor solution goes belly up,
your solution might disappear completely into thin air leaving you with
no recourse, whereas with open source, you always have the "do it
yourself" option. To my thinking, the fundamental problem Eclipse faces
is the free riders who use the technology and effectively give nothing
back to improve it...
> I hope that large corporations will with this acquisition understand
> that only using open source projects and not purchasing any other tool
> is not possible anymore with IBM acquisition of Sun.
I have no idea how you arrive at this conclusion. It seems an assertion
coming out of thin air.
> I hope that Eclipse will finally become a profitable market for ISV
> vendor.
I think Eclipse is a basis upon which to build profitable technology and
services and that Eclipse creates a market opportunity; it's not
directly a market given it's open source.
> If Eclipse just remain "a gigs open source market" then IBM will
> certainly not invest anymore.
I don't follow the "gigs" thing... IBM is investing less because it's
expecting others to follow its long term investment and as long as
everything just shows up for free, what would compel others do do so.
The free rider problem presents an ongoing challenge.
> This is why I think that IBM will first consider how to monetized
> Eclipse versus Netbeans than the real technological value of each
> platform.
IBM has such a huge technology stack on top of Eclipse that I can't
imagine that being refocused. Of course Web 2.0 is just too funky to
ignore...
> Open source professional tools market is therefore dead today !!
Because of IBM buying Sun? Again, I haven't a clue how this follows.
> This is the return of the king "IBM" and the end of Sun open source
> monetized market dream.
That's very dramatic.
Let me ask you this. You've got a company that's made heavy use of
Eclipse technology, so what have you contributed back to improve the
code quality of the small projects with very few committers upon which
you rely?
>
> Vlad,
> Omondo
>
>
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| Re: IBM, Sun, NB, and Eclipse ? [message #58322 is a reply to message #58294] |
Sat, 21 March 2009 10:10 |
| Eclipse User |
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This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
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Vlad,
Comments below.
Vlad Varnica wrote:
> Ed,
>
> I agree with the fact that the eclipse foundation doesn't adopt open
> source projects and simply hosts them. What I don't agree is that this
> information is not really public and that many companies believe that
> each project is under Eclipse Umbrella and protection.
Not really public? Isn't that like being a little bit pregnant? What's
implied by this Umbrella of protection? A 1-800 support service?
Certainly the technology is IP clean and ready for commercial
consumption, but buyer ought to read all the licenses, terms, and
conditions, which I think are quite clear on this matter.
> This is today breaking our traditional ISV business model which is to
> build value on the top of open source frameworks such as EMF and not
> to provide out of box fully professional tools in order to help large
> corporations to reduce their software investments.
So all the Eclipse members building products on top of Eclipse are
broken? I don't see the evidence for that. Definitely Eclipse
*requires *that the projects provide *extensible *technology so that
there is the possibility to provide value add. But in the end, there is
no limit to how good or complete the out-of-the-box experience for a
project is allowed to be. JDT for example is world class. It would be
hard to build a product that improves on it. That's okay but we should
have a double standard for other projects?
>
> Our problem is in the last three years many open source tools used the
> EMF with GMF framework in order to directly compete with existing
> vendors by adding many professional features.
A problem indeed. Better work hard to keep ahead. Ride the wave of
change or be swept away by it.
> The result is that the monetized modeling plugin market is impossible
> today
More challenging I agree. Few things are impossible though
> and that for example we can't pay high level consultant such you Ed,
> or even add free contributors members to this group because the
> generated revenue is too small. This is why today Eclipse is non
> monetized market and I hope this will finally change.
I wouldn't hold my breath. The waves of changes don't tend to stop.
> Omondo is using two plugins which are EMF and GEF. We refuse to use GMF.
You make EMF sound so small and light weight. I like that. :-)
>
> Now be sure that we will not contribute to any EMF project because we
> don't agree with the global project technical orientation which is
> more to compete UML that provide real value and because other open
> source projects would reuse it and provide it for free to our end users.
I'd suggest you never complain about the quality of things others have
invested in heavily and you use for free. EMF was used to build things
like XSD and UML. If it competes with them, perhaps that's a short
coming in UML and XSD.
> It is therefore breaking our existing market.
Find a new one.
> There are over 5,000 bugs inside EMF as soon as you try to develop an
> advanced and professional solution.
That's the most nonsensical thing you've said so far. My list
< https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/buglist.cgi?product=EMF&co mponent=Core&component=Doc&component=Edit&compon ent=Mapping&component=Tools&component=XML/XMI&bu g_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED &bug_status=RESOLVED&resolution=FIXED&resolution =---&order=bugs.bug_status,bugs.target_milestone,bugs.bu g_id&query_format=advanced>
shows not a single unresolved defect, only requests for more goodness.
It's hard to buy that level of quality, service, and support from a vendor.
> Omondo did pay the price to fix them and we will certainly not give
> them to our open source competitors today.
Likely you'll take them to the big bit bucket in the sky then. Of
course if you've directly modified the base EMF code and you are
shipping those modifications in your products without sharing the source
you are in violation of the terms of the EPL. I'd not discuss such
things on this forum were I you...
> Sorry about that we like to play the rules but not to be stupid.
It sounds like you aren't playing by the rules, which would be quite
stupid to admit in public.
>
> Concerning GMF it is different because we just don't see any interest
> to use it.
So don't.
> GMF is helping to reduce development cost when building an UML tool
No, it's more general than that. It's for building a graphical editor
for any model, with UML being just one instance.
> and this is today used by all the open source projects.
Neither UML nor GMF are used by all the open source projects. EMF comes
close though. :-P
> We consider that only native integration to EMF and GEF can generate
> technological value and adding and intermediate stage in the middle is
> major problem for scalability, live synchronization or for full
> project life cycle modeling keeping the same UML Id.
Yet IBM builds its UML products on this stack. I imagine you must
compete very well with them then...
> It is not possible today to keep all these advanced features because
> of all these transformation stages. Except to reduce time to market
> development in order to compete tools there is no other interest in GMF.
Why bring it up then? There must be a lot of projects you're not
interested in... I'll bet you don't like Papyrus much and no doubt
Ecore Tools isn't high on your list either. I'm rather fond of Ecore
Tools personally.
>
> Concerning GEF this project is just fantastic and don't really need
> additional support.
>
> My previous post was concerning the change that IBM acquisition have
> on the market. For me the professional open source tool market
> providers is dead because the real need is to build value on the top
> of existing frameworks and not to try to reduce large corporations
> software expenses.
We see many examples now of groups of consumers getting together to
collaborate on building technology that they can reuse more cheaply than
buying it from a vendor, and thereby also avoid vendor lock-in. That
will happen regardless of whether IBM buys Sun. I don't see a
connection between the two.
> If EMF and GMF goal are only to compete with UML or existing tool
> vendors then be sure that these projects will not find many support
> from larger corporations and will sooner or later stop supporting them.
You've got a very narrow view on what EMF is all about. Even if what
you said were true, your conclusion is still wrong: large corporations
would happily use free UML tools. That might be very unfortunate for
Omondo and would even be unfortunate for IBM which derives a great deal
of revenue from it's UML tools.
> It is still time to change this EMF and GMF none sense strategy and be
> more positive.
Don't hold your breath. You aren't the arbiter of what's positive and
what's not. In fact, I set the strategy for EMF and that strategy has
nothing to do with competing with UML tools. The goal is the provide
the world's best build data integration platform upon which anyone can
build any kind of cool application. Some of those applications might
compete with you and some might be ones you use to build your ISV
technology more expediently.
> We need stable frameworks to add value on the top of them
Like EMF.
> and not hundred of new open sources projects trying to compete with us.
Too bad, you get those too. The sword has two edges.
> Eclipse foundation has given too much marketing to these projects and
> made end users believe that they don't need anymore traditional ISV
> vendors.
You can't put a lid on competition, so be prepared for it.
> I will never agree with this vision and financial institution which
> are currently helping IBM to acquire Sun have the same vision.
You don't need to agree with it. You don't even get involved enough to
help influence the direction. The guy in the driver's seat controls
where the car goes. The guy in the back seat can only move his lips and
hope that effects the changes he desires.
> WE NEED TO MONETIZED ECLIPSE.
So be innovative. If you don't, someone with a different vision will.
>
> Vlad,
> Omondo
>
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Vlad,<br>
<br>
Comments below.<br>
<br>
Vlad Varnica wrote:
<blockquote
cite="mid:5e4bb5cd1918d28908ae832a39b1ce03$1@www.eclipse.org"
type="cite">Ed,
<br>
<br>
I agree with the fact that the eclipse foundation doesn't adopt open
source projects and simply hosts them. What I don't agree is that this
information is not really public and that many companies believe that
each project is under Eclipse Umbrella and protection.</blockquote>
Not really public?
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| Re: Sun acquired by Oracle and not IBM [message #58661 is a reply to message #58637] |
Thu, 23 April 2009 09:03 |
| Eclipse User |
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Vlad,
Comments below.
Vlad Varnica wrote:
> Ed,
>
> It is always the same old story with you :-)
Likewise.
> The reality is that only IBM has contributed to EMF as a company and
> very few other members.
No, reality doesn't conform to your narrow view. Modeling is far more
diverse than that.
> Did you ever asked yourself why ?
No.
> When I see that a committer can not even get any funds to keep going
> his job then this is bad. Why can't we pay our lads ?
Because we treat them like children?
>
> I have vision which is to build tools on open source standards and
> make this market profitable.
That's nice. Is it working well?
> I don't mean to become rich, just to be able as a consulting team to
> make our living from our daily job.
Give is this day our daily job...
> Omondo would be happy to pay for consulting, or EMF committers.
In theory.
> Unfortunately the EMF and Eclipse market don't exist because
> permanently challenge by open source dreamers thinking they can
> rebuild everything from scratch.
Innovation is a relentless force.
> During this period nobody buys anymore software because they dream to
> be able to do the job alone.
No because they get what they need for free.
> I have seen a company which has invested over a million euro trying to
> have live code and model synchronization in consulting and not paying
> just one EclipseUML license for $ 2,000.
Others will always do as they see fit.
> I am fed up with this open source guys spending money and in the same
> time killing traditional small ISV business.
Too bad. Get used to it.
> Where is the tradition return on investment cost ?
Find a new tradition.
> After such a disastrous EMF and Eclipse foundation strategy I am not
> surprised that nobody invest anymore on the modeling market.
So the end is nigh. And next will be?
> It is time for a change.
One of the few constants in this universe is change.
> I would like to see an official study on Return on investment between
> selecting open source plugins and building tools and selecting Eclipse
> ISV.
Of course you expect someone else to do it. Good luck with that.
> This would be an honest move and could be a first step for
> reconciliation between the Eclipse Foundation, EMF team and Omondo.
It's just not a compelling need for me. I would suggest you think hard
about a vision that works with the new reality rather than looking for a
way to make the old reality come back because you can't turn back the
clock. And for goodness sake, take some responsibility for your own
failures.
>
> Vlad,
>
>
>
>
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| Re: Sun acquired by Oracle and not IBM [message #58685 is a reply to message #58661] |
Thu, 23 April 2009 11:42 |
| Eclipse User |
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Ed,
I agree with you that I should take responsibility on my own business
model failure. As a Java developer I was expecting to deal with Java
developers but it seems that it would have been a better idea to directly
negotiate with the management.
Each developer likes to use the latest technology or learn new frameworks
such EMF, because the more framework they know the better is their market
value.
Developers don't really care about the learning curve time.
btw, I agree with them and if I was not self employed I would certainly
have done the same :-)
The management needs to reduce development costs and therefore to take out
of the box EMF tools such as Omondo.
I should have spent more time dealing with manager than developers. It is
time to change it now. It doesn't mean that we don't respect developers it
just means that doing hi level deals is the only solution to survive on
this modeling / Eclipse Market.
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