A Big Part of Eclipse's Secret Sauce is "Balance", Says Milinkovich
In his keynote speech at the EclipseWorld 2006 conference in Boston, Eclipse Foundation Executive Director Mike Milinkovich attributed Eclipse's success as an open source tools platform to a "secret sauce" enabling multiple organizations to work together. The foundation seeks to build "the universal development platform," Milinkovich said. "I think really a big part of the secret sauce of Eclipse is about balance," with participants building shared tools and frameworks and then developing a profitable ecosystem of commercial products on top of the Eclipse platform, Milinkovich said. Unlike the Sun Microsystems-led NetBeans open source platform, Eclipse offers a level playing field for participants, he said.
"The real answer of what I want to talk about today is I think Eclipse has discovered, perhaps invented, the secret sauce for getting organizations together that want to build open source. My dream for Eclipse is this becomes an institution that lasts long after I'm gone," Milinkovich said.