Eclipse, behind the scenes

[Gabor Beres]

Hi!

I have a misunderstanding about the eclipse community, and i'd like someone to make it clear for me.

I often read on eclipse.org, that some big company joined the eclipse community, to donate their codebase, and help on developing a project.
What is the motivation behind that? I think eclipse (as a free, universal tool platform) will blow away their tool bussiness. So why they work against themselves?

Thanks

[Ilja Preuss]

Originally posted by Gabor Beres:
What is the motivation behind that?

Several come to mind:

- Core Eclipse is free, but might miss some features someone wants. If, for example, you are already using Eclipse, but are missing a good profiler, you are probably more likely to buy one that tightly integrates into eclipse. And the more closely a company works together with the eclipse team, the more tightly they can integrate their product into eclipse as a plugin.

- By building their product on top of the eclipse platform, they can concentrate on their key competence (such as building a profiler), without having to care much about basic functionality (such as window management etc.)

- Some companies may decide to move from making money by selling software to making money by selling services (like training, consulting etc.).

[Gabor Beres]

"but might miss some features someone wants"

but if they both develop the eclipse.org, and commersial plugins, i think they could agree with each other, to miss some advanced feature from the free plugins, and make bussiness from that.