Open Source's Best-Kept Secret Redux

About 18 months ago, I wrote a post called "Open Source's Best-Kept Secret" about Eclipse, how wonderful it was, and yet how few knew about it. Now what do I find?

Eclipse may be the most important open-source "project" that people outside the industry, and even some within it, have never heard of.

Yup, Matt and I agree again. His piece is an excellent interview with the head of Eclipse, Mike Milinkovich. I also interviewed him recently, for my feature about the open source ecosystem in Redmond Magazine. Matt's ranges more widely, and is probably the best intro to what Eclipse is up to, how it functions, and why it is so important.

Indeed, I wonder whether it will actually prove to be the most important open source project of all in the long term. As Matt points out:

In late June, Eclipse made available the largest-ever simultaneous release of open-source software, called Europa: 17 million lines of code, representing the contributions of 310 open-source developers in 19 countries. Twenty-one new tools were included in the "Europa" release, all free to download.

Think about that. The Linux kernel has around 6 million lines of code.... The Java Development Kit that Sun open sourced has 6.5 million.... Sun's StarOffice release in 2000 (which was believed to be the largest open-source release to that point) had 9 million.... Firefox has 2.5 million.

Yeah, think about it....

Eclipse Eclipses Itself

As I wrote over a year ago, Eclipse is really open source's best-kept secret. Today, the best got even better:

The Eclipse Foundation today announced the availability of its annual coordinated project release, this year code named Europa. Europa features 21 Eclipse projects for software developers and is more than double the size of last year's record-setting release.

The release consists of more than 17 million lines of code and the contributions of over 310 open source developers located in 19 different countries. The 2006 release, code named Callisto, involved 10 project teams, 7 million lines of code, and 260 open-source developers in 12 countries. This is the fourth year in a row the Eclipse community has shipped a major release on schedule.

Innovations in the Europa release include new runtime technology for creating server applications, developer tools for service-oriented architecture (SOA), tools for improving team collaboration and support for users of the popular Ruby programming language.

Wow.