Open Enterprise Interview: Mike Milinkovich

On Open Enterprise blog.

A Marriage Made in Geek Heaven

Long-time readers of this blog will now that I'm a big fan of Eclipse, and believe it to be potentially one of the top two or three open source projects ever. A further step towards that position has been taken with the release of the Eclipse PHP Development Tools project:

Eclipse PDT is a set of tools and frameworks that enhance the productivity of developers using PHP, a popular, general-purpose dynamic language that is especially suited for development of web applications and web services. This is the first Eclipse project that targets the large PHP developer community.

“Eclipse has long been enriched by the wide number of programming languages supported” says Mike Milinkovich, general director of the Eclipse organization. “The release of PDT 1.0 is great news as it will allow the estimated 4.5 million PHP developers to begin using Eclipse-based tools and greatly expand the entire Eclipse community.”

PHP developers using PDT will now be able to leverage the large ecosystem of over 1,400 Eclipse plugins. Many PHP developers use a number of different development languages, such as Java and C/C++. They also use development tools for tasks like source code management (SCM), testing, and profiling when building rich internet applications. PDT enables them to use Eclipse to integrate all of these tools into one single development environment.

The best IDE for probably the most popular Web scripting language: what's not to like?

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....

Everything You Wanted to Know About Eclipse...

...but didn't. Well, almost.

I've said it several times: Eclipse is open source's best-kept secret. So this quick summary of how it got to where it is today from the horse's mouth - Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation - is particularly welcome. And more to come, apparently.

Update: And here is more: Part II, all about ecosystems, a subject close to my heart.