NewsForge: Eclipse (12 Million Downloads) Shows Big Progress

“Years ago, when you thought of bulky, white-collared Big Blue,
open source wasn’t the first thing that sprung to mind. But now,
besides being a vocal Linux advocate, the company is actively
integrating such products as Apache Tomcat servers, Jabber IM,
Xerces XML parsers, OpenSSH, the Jikes Research VM, and numerous
others into its humongous product stack. And besides all that,
there’s IBM’s considerable influence in the Eclipse Project, which
designed, architected, and produced Eclipse — a full-featured,
open source toolkit for building Web services and other
applications. The free downloads on Eclipse.org have met with an
inspired response.

“‘Eclipse enables developers to work with best-of-breed tools
using plug-ins from different vendors in our integrated,
portal-like environment,’ said Vivek Sarkar, senior manager for
programming technologies at IBM Research. Sarkar’s main
responsibility is to keep finding fresh things to put into the
Eclipse toolkit. ‘Our goal is to make it easier for technology
producers to create, integrate and use software tools. It also
saves developers a lot of time and money…'”

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