Rich Unger feels it right to add a note in his blog following the prank Roumen Strobl played on the Eclipse team at JavaOne. Allegedly, Roumen stuck a bunch of NetBeans stickers on the Eclipse Foundation booth on the pavilion show floor, photographed the spectacle and pasted them on his blog. In response, Rich writes, “I think it was a bit inappropriate, but there was no real damage done. There’s no real ill will among the folks in the trenches.”

The products compete, and there are a lot of heated debates and personal attacks on message boards and blogs, but Rich says you don’t generally see that from the folks who actually ‘work’ on these products.

Rich explains this with the example of the JavaOne party, where “a dozen folks from Eclipse, NetBeans and OSGi met”. “We discussed modular architecture, opinions on superpackages in Dolphin, software update methodologies, and how utterly ridiculous the flame wars are getting. We were comparing notes. There were no ideas being held back. The OSGi folks wanted to know what it would take to get NB to talk their protocol. I asked about how Eclipse handles some project and workspace layout stuff under the hood. It was an interesting discussion, and we all had fun. Competitors, to be sure, but in a very open, healthy way.”