Eclipse Gains Momentum (updated)

This week at the EclipseCon in Santa Clara we announced that MySQL joined the Eclipse Foundation.  Admittedly, I wish we would have joined a long time ago (like maybe the first hundred times Mike and Donald asked us) but we finally got our ducks in a row.  To me Eclipse is one of the most successful and intriguing open source projects to date.  The entire process of open sourcing Eclipse was a masterpiece of strategy led by IBM that enabled them to create the best extensible tools platform.  There are really only two development tools platforms that matter: Eclipse and Visual Studio.  While both are open and extensible, only one of them is oopen source and cross-platform.

In fact, Eclipse has garnered support from more than 130 member firms and there are now more than 1000 Eclipse plug-ins and more than 60 projects under way.  Anyone who still thinks of Eclipse as a Java IDE is missing the boat.  It's a platform for all kinds of innovative tools. 

So not surprisingly there were a number of notable announcements at EclipseCon from companies including IBM, MySQL, Zend, SugarCRM, Exadel, Compuware, Salesforce.com and others.

• MySQL: MySQL Joins the Eclipse Foundation
• SugarCRM: Leading Open Source CRM Joins Eclipse
• Zend: Eclipse, Zend, IBM announce PHP IDE Project
• ZDNet: Eclipse Bulks Up, Reaches Out
• ComputerWorld: Eclipse: Sun Still Welcome to Join