It started off with an on-again, off-again friendship between the two largest open-source tools projects. Now, Sun Microsystems has shown an interest in joining Eclipse, once backed almost completely by its rival IBM.

In a talk with Tim Cramer, director for Java Tools at Sun Microsystems, zdnet’s Ed Burnette found that Sun was willing to discuss a partnership if:

• The Eclipse Community changed its name.
• They stop fracturing the Java platform. “Don’t use your own compiler, use the standard. Don’t augment the runtime with SWT.”

Eclipse was the result of years of commercial and research work by a Canadian company called OTI, which was bought by IBM. NetBeans started as a student project in the Czech Republic called Xelfi; it went commercial and was bought by Sun. Independently, both IBM and Sun decided to make their software open source in order to gain developer mindshare; Sun in June 2000 and IBM in November 2001.

IBM spun off Eclipse into its own Foundation three years ago. IBM has a seat on the board, but not a permanent one or one with the power of veto - all the strategic members are equal.

A bid for Sun to join the Eclipse foundation was laid on the table in late 2003. The idea was to find a way to coalesce the two open-source projects under a single entity. However, Sun declined the offer in December that year, stating that it had decided with Eclipse that overcoming the technical and organizational differences between the two groups would adversely affect current participants in the NetBeans and Eclipse projects.
At that time, Sun had stated that it was still willing to reopen discussions with Eclipse in the future, and events that occurred after that seemed indicative of such talks.

Genuitec, at EclipseCon 2006, stunned the Eclipse community when they announced that they had ported the Matisse GUI builder to run as an Eclipse plug-in for MyEclipse Enterprise Workbench users. Tim Cramer was invited as special guest for the demo. Those skeptical of his approval of the venture were put at ease. “Matisse4MyEclipse is positive for the Java community,” he said, adding: “It validates Matisse as a premiere feature set.”

As the industry continued its innovations, viz Ruby Rails, PHP, and Microsoft’s Visual Studio, the areas of disagreement between the two Java teams don’t seem to be quite as important as they used to.

Ed Burnette comments, “I see lots of up-side and no down-side in Sun joining the Eclipse Foundation. There would be a little bit of pride-swallowing, but many other joiners have had to do that. The long-term benefits to the Java community would far outweigh any temporary discomfort.”