JBuilder Eclipsed?
Will wonders never cease? According to an, as yet unconfirmed, news item on The Register, Borland is reacting to dropping first quarter sales by opensourcing JBuilder, it’s flagship Java IDE; and what is more, donating it’s code to archrival Eclipse.
Borland is a founding member of the Eclipse Foundation and had recently announced that it would be joining it’s Board of Directors as a Strategic Developer. It was apparent, as early as last Spring, that Eclipse was closing in fast on JBuilder, but it was difficult to foresee such a gambit.
According to Gavin Clarke, of the Reg, the company hopes to offset JBuilder’s R&D expenses by relying on the Open Source community around Eclipse to drive API and feature improvements. Borland is apparently banking on the popular “sell it, free it” Open Source business model, hoping that the opensourced version will function as a loss leader for the next-generation commercial version of JBuilder.
I can already hear the cries about the new Borg in town, but whatever the reason for this surprising turn of events, it would be great news for users of both development environments, and the Java community in general.
On a related note, Information Week reports that the Eclipse Foundation will team up with the Los Alamos National Laboratory to make Eclipse a central host for parallel-computing tools, utilising Eclipse’s celebrated plugin architecture. The Eclipse Parallel Tools Platform Project team (what a mouthful!) has already produced a pre-release version of a Fortran Development Tools environment, based on the CDT 3.0 series (confusingly named CLDT).
Update (07:30): Interesting (and quite accurate, from what I remember) recap of Borland’s fickle attitude towards Open Source, from a Slashdot poster. Closing statement: “Those of us who’ve been observing Borland throughout all this expect them to maintain about as steady a course as a carload of squabbling thirteen-year-olds who just stole a car and a case of beer”.
Also: BDN Architect & Borland Evangelist, John Kaster, runs damage control and slams the Register. Official version: Borland is planning on building the “JBuilder experience” on Eclipse in addition to its current Primetime implementation. (I knew I just had to wait for the Score:5 goodies to build up in the Slashdot thread…)
