Tuesday, August 17, 2004

Eclipsing Windows is inaccurate

Recently I read an article by Luc Hatlestad "Can Microsoft Be Eclipsed?". The article talked in great length about an Open Source project called "Eclipse".

It was very evident from the article that the writer had never used Eclipse for any real development effort. Eclipse is a development tool, and there are many development tools available for Linux. Eclipse however being developed in Java is a cross platform IDE. It mainly focuses on Java, but with third party add-in's it can support other programming languages. However nice this is it still does not lend any support to the theme of the article that Linux, thanks to Eclipse, will take market share in the Desktop space.

There was one line in the article that confuses me to no end.

"But to date, not many application providers have written software for the Eclipse client. These are the folks VARs will want to watch as they try to decide if, when and how deeply to take the plunge into the Linux market."

So VARs should watch to see if some applicatin provider writes an add-in to Eclipse to gauge whether or not they should invest in Linux.

Eclipse has very little to do with this. VARs should watch to see who is writing software for Linux and what type of software it is. Additionally they should gauge the needs of thier customers with whether or not Linux can meet those needs. None of this has anything to do with Eclipse. Eclipse is an IDE and a development tool not a reason to choose Linux over Windows.

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