eclipse

I came across news this afternoon about the LiMo Foundation endorsing the Open Mobile Terminal Platform specification, and I realized that I didn't care. It's probably big news, but I couldn't get excited.

I feel the same way about most things that come out of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), but probably because the ASF isn't one for making big announcements (except when it collects cash from Microsoft). Even so, I know the ASF is a hugely important organization. Its only "problem" is that it lacks an active public relations team. But I doubt … Read more

Eclipse showed off two cool new products at CES 2009, an all-in-one in-dash navigation and media unit, and docking head unit for a TomTom GPS device. The all-in-one AVN726E goes a long way towards turning your old beater into a high-tech machine, with navigation, Bluetooth, and multimedia playback. The AVN4430 works as a compromise between a portable nav unit and an integrated in-dash nav. A TomTom GPS easily docks with the unit, giving you navigation in the car, or you can take the TomTom out and use it in other cars. We also checked out a few other things in … Read more

OStatic's Sam Dean speculates that 2009 could be the year of open source mergers and acquisitions, what with the super-low valuations of Sun, Novell, and Red Hat. He may be right, though we might also see these (and others) snapping up the low-hanging fruit of even smaller open-source companies in an attempt to unify a growing open-source ecosystem under one corporate roof.

As I fell asleep last night, however, a different thought struck me: do Eclipse and Mozilla suggest an entirely new form of M&A for open source?

Yesterday I suggested that creating an OpenOffice foundation might be the best way to resolve its alleged management problems. … Read more

The Eclipse Foundation has released an updated roadmap, one that recognizes Windows current importance, but also sees Windows Vista as an opportunity to nudge developers to the Eclipse platform, potentially away from Microsoft's Vista:

Approximately 85% of Eclipse download requests are for the Windows OS. With the Vista release there are a number of efforts to port Windows applications. This presents an opportunity for organizations who will take the opportunity to migrate to the more ubiquitous and portable Eclipse platform. In order to leverage the opportunity as much as Vista, it is essential that relevant Eclipse projects support and … Read more

Sprint has announced that it will launch an update to the Sanyo Katana Eclipse, dubbed the Katana Eclipse X. The primary difference is that the Katana Eclipse X will have Sprint's new One Click user interface. One Click, as seen on phones like the Samsung Rant, the Samsung Highnote, and the LG Lotus, consists of eight shortcut tiles along the bottom of the home screen that gives you quick access to your favorite applications. Aside from that, it has the same unique lighting effects of the original, as well as EV-DO, a megapixel camera, and more. The Katana Eclipse … Read more

CNET's Stephen Shankland has already picked up on Google's decision to allow two popular open-source licenses back onto its Google Code open-source repository. Up until now, the Mozilla Public License (MPL) and Eclipse Public License (EPL) were both banned from the site.

The reasoning Shankland reports for Google belatedly approving the licenses, however, is a bit bizarre. In the case of the EPL, Google's Chris DiBona argues:

Eclipse is an important, lively, and healthy project with an enormous plug-in and developer community that uses an otherwise duplicative license. They aren't interested in using the BSD or … Read more

Google has undone an earlier ban on the Mozilla Public License, an option for open-source projects hosted at its Google Code site.

Ostensibly as part of an effort to discourage the proliferation of open-source licenses, Google dropped support for the MPL earlier in August. Now, though, the company reconsidered, restoring it and adding support for the Eclipse Public License as well.

"How we think about licenses is getting a bit more nuanced," said Chris DiBona, leader of Google's open-source team in a blog posting.

Before, the company had tried to discourage the increase in the number of … Read more

I received an interesting email today from the Eclipse Foundation, interesting because it cut against an experience I had at work, and against Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst's evangelism to convince more enterprises to contribute to open-source software projects.

I'm aware of a number of mission-critical applications happily running on open-source software, unpaid and unsupported. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how I feel about my quarterly numbers at any given moment :-), my own company's code is included in this observation. In each case, the enterprise contributes nothing back to the respective open-source communities.

Eclipse, however, is … Read more

Sprint brought back two popular cell phones for another round on Sunday when it announced new versions of the Sanyo Katana and the Motorola Razr.

Sporting thin designs (of course) with GPS and multimedia-friendly feature sets, the Sanyo Katana Eclipse and the Motorola Razr VE20 offer two takes on the thin-phone craze that just won't go away. And before you start grumbling about rehashed versions of ancient designs, we advise you to give these models a decent look.

The VE20 is more like the original Razr V3m than the Razr2 V9, but it shows some design tweaks that give … Read more