In the wake of the recent statement made by Mike Milinkovich on Eclipse not having a ‘real relationship’ with Sun, Dan Roberts, the company’s director of marketing for developer tools, is quick to tell The Register’s Tim Anderson that they are always open to ‘conversations with Mike’. He adds, “We’re firmly committed to the NetBeans platform. It is the core piece of our development strategy for tools.

Tim refers to an open letter sent out by Sun in 2004 claiming that the company hopes to find a solution that benefits both Eclipse and NetBeans communities ‘in very open and visible ways, where Sun can be an open contributor to Eclipse, and Eclipse can do the same for the NetBeans platform’. Roberts comments, “At that time, we were in deep conversations with them about ways we could work together. Unfortunately, as with many business conversations, we were not able to reach a consensus on what would be amicable terms for both parties.”

Tim highlights the issues of Eclipse’s SWT vs. Swing and even why JSR 198, the Java Community Process standard for extending all Java IDEs with plug-ins doesn’t feature Eclipse.

In conclusion, Roberts simply says, “We're quite happy with the momentum and direction we have with Netbeans, and we're quite happy that Eclipse exists. Eclipse several years ago was relatively far ahead of Netbeans from a technology and functionality standpoint, and Eclipse really made Netbeans a lot better. The competition between us is a good thing for Java developers against the proprietary closed-source models that others are using to compete against the Java ecosystem.”