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Eclipse tells ex-community director to 'go away'

Open-source communities are founded on trust. It's therefore disappointing but not surprising, to see the Eclipse Foundation's executive director, Mike Milinkovich, rip into former Eclipse Foundation director of community Bjorn Freeman-Benson and tell him to take his "steady acid drip of negativity" and "go away."

Milinkovich, a steelie, hockey-playing executive, didn't mince words in a blog post:

Your former colleagues at the Eclipse Foundation have tolerated your public abuse quietly because we are professionals, and we honestly thought that you would tire of it. Apparently we were wrong. But the time has come … Read more

Tilera's balancing act: 100 cores vs. market realities

While we're all familiar with the steady increase in the number of cores in mainstream PC and server processors, the corresponding progress in the embedded-processor market has been anything but steady.

With mainstream PC microprocessors standardizing on four-core designs such as Intel's Core i7 and leading-edge server chips ranging from 8 to 16 cores, single-core chips are no longer competitive. For embedded systems, however, one core may still be the right answer; if more are needed, the choices range up into the hundreds.

The latest announcement in the many-core embedded processor market is Tilera's Tile-Gx family, which … Read more

Can open source monopolize a market?

Open source is used to playing underdog to incumbent proprietary vendors. What will happen when open source dominates, rather than commoditizes, markets?

I ask because several open-source projects are not far from owning dominant market share in their respective markets. Mozilla's Asa Dotzler reports that Firefox is "on track to easily reach 25 percent of global usage by the end of the year." That may not sound like much, but given that Microsoft has been losing five percentage points of browser market share each year while Firefox gains five percentage points, and it's not hard to … Read more

BlackBerry dev tools target Eclipse, Visual Studio

The smartphone maker made its first BlackBerry Web Development Plug-In for Eclipse available on Tuesday, along with version 1.2 of its plug-in for Microsoft Visual Studio. The tools allow developers to build BlackBerry Web applications within the widely used Eclipse and Visual Studio environments.

"The BlackBerry developer tools portfolio aims to bring together the best of Java and Web development for the creation of Web applications that are integrated with core BlackBerry smartphone functions for a seamless, intuitive, and robust user experience," BlackBerry platform group chief Alan Brenner said in a statement.

Both plug-ins include BlackBerry smartphone … Read more

Eclipse AVN726e features 3D maps (review)

The AVN726e, Eclipse's newest double-DIN DVD/navigation receiver, was making a name for itself even before it was released to the public, as it was named Best of Innovations at CES 2009 in the In-Vehicle Navigation/Telematics/ITS product category. We were too busy being wowed by its sibling, the Eclipse AVN4430, to take notice.

However, after spending time with the AVN726e, we find there's a lot to love about this navigation receiver, including its bright LCD, snappy response times, and particularly its beautiful 3D navigation maps. The maps feature elevation data--so if you go over an overpass, … Read more