Re: [eclipse-dev] [ide-dev] Why we dropped Eclipse in favour of IntelliJ

[Pascal Rapicault <pascal.rapicault@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

When it comes to OSS, very few large companies have the maturity level that Ericsson or others have, and in those not-too-OSS-savvy companies it  is easier for a manager to ask for a finite budget to purchase tools (and remember also that they will get a significant discount), than having the discussion to hire in house developers or consultant to fix or build the tool they need.

On top of that when you buy a tool, you get immediate result, and if something goes wrong you get professional support and don’t have to wait for a committer to answer (because remember that nobody will ever be committer on all projects so even if I’m committer on project A I will still use project B).

 

Over the years of being involved with commercial software tools, I have always been surprised by the amount of people who were ready to spend money even on a free tool, either to buy “piece of mind”, to ensure continued improvement of the tool, fix some minor glitches, etc. In fact some companies are even be ready to pay for new features to be developed in the OSS.

Unfortunately at Eclipse we don’t offer that in any form or others.

 

Earlier we were talking about how to fund developers at the foundation? I think that if the foundation was willing to sell Eclipse support, then this would most likely pay for a couple developers and support ppl, etc. that could contribute to improve the status quo and hear first-hand of the users problem (and those that we get in bugs are not representative of the mass of developers behind corporate doors, for example how many ericsson.com email addresses do we have in BZ when ericsson internally has over 10,000 eclipse users).

I realize that there is chicken-and-egg problem with that approach, but imo it worth being tried.

 

From: eclipse-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:eclipse-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Andrew Overholt
Sent: September-20-13 3:03 PM
To: General development mailing list of the Eclipse project.
Cc: ide-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [eclipse-dev] [ide-dev] Why we dropped Eclipse in favour of IntelliJ | Java Code Geeks

 

On Fri, Sep 20, 2013 at 10:42 AM, John Arthorne <John_Arthorne@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> From: Marcel Bruch <bruch@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

> The interesting part is that companies with thousands of developers
> that use JDT would benefit from every single minute their developers
> save with an improved Eclipse. Maybe it shouldn't be a single
> company but an interest group of 5-10 member companies? Small
> companies like ours can't sponsor but we can offer our services to
> help improving things in JDT's infrastructure as part of a long-term
> initiative.

This is a mystery to me too. If a company with 1000+ developers was considering switching from Eclipse to a commercial alternative, they could instead spend a fraction of that amount directly investing in the tools with a similar gain in productivity.

 

I agree with your reasoning, John.

For those that disagree or don't see this as a viable option, do we have a list of companies or committers working as consultants that will take money from people seeking to get support or enhancements made?

Andrew