Borland is taking a bigger stake in the organization it helped found,
joining the Eclipse Foundation’s board of directors as a strategic
developer, officials will announce in a press conference Monday at
EclipseCon 2005 in Burlingame, California.
The software delivery provider is also preparing to propose a project based on its software delivery optimization (SDO) initiative.
As a strategic developer, Borland will pay a yearly $250,000 fee to the
organization as well as provide eight full-time developers to support
the
foundation. The company was one of the original nine organizations that formed the board of stewards after IBM donated the code
that formed the basis for Eclipse.
The Scotts Valley, Calif., software development company is parlaying
its new
leadership role to launch a project within the open source development
organization. Officials said they would submit a proposal for a graphical modeling framework sub-project of the Eclipse Technology
project. It is based on the technology used in Together, the modeling foundation for Borland’s software
delivery optimization (SDO) initiative.
Raaj Shinde, Borland vice president of product strategy and
architecture,
said the proposal, which hasn’t been formally submitted to the Eclipse
Foundation, builds on an area they have some expertise with, he said,
as
Together has been running on Eclipse since 2002. The project has a
good
chance of looking like a port of its commercial product.
“The proposal is actually to help build some of the common
infrastructure
that Eclipse needs to actually build tools like that effectively on top
of
Eclipse,” he said. “We may very well donate a lot of our existing
source
code into the Eclipse Foundation and we’ll also have some people
working on
that full time and we will lead the technology project.”
Modeling is a key component of Borland’s SDO push, creating the rules
by
which software projects are designed and implemented. Earlier this
month,
Borland announced the release its integrated application lifecycle
management (ALM) offering, Core
Software Delivery Platform, to the public. The integration of
Together
and several other products, its designed to operate within its JBuilder
IDE
Microsoft’s Visual Studio.
Skip McGaughey, an Eclipse spokesman, said Borland’s installment on the
board of directors will add significant expertise and energy to the
Eclipse
Foundation, and doesn’t expect the company to have any difficulties
getting
its project accepted within the organization. It’s too early to tell,
he
said, whether the project will remain a sub-project or become a
top-level
project down the road.
“The key to some of the projects on Eclipse is that they can evolve in
lots
of different directions, and they are evolved in ways we had never
anticipated,” he said. “Based upon the contributions and the companies
that
are engaging [in the project], they can take a life on their own and
still
take advantage of the interoperability and common services of the
Eclipse
platform.”
The announcement comes amid an expansion within Eclipse Foundation membership. Eclipse holdout
BEA Systems just announced it would join the Eclipse board of directors as a strategic developer,
donating $1.5 million in money, code and developers to the
organization.
The same day, Sybase officials said they, too, would
join
the Eclipse ranks on the board of directors.
