I agree with the fact that the eclipse foundation doesn't adopt open
source projects and simply hosts them.
What I don't agree is that this information is not really public and that
many companies believe that each project is under Eclipse Umbrella and
protection.
This is today breaking our traditional ISV business model which is to
build value on the top of open source frameworks such as EMF and not to
provide out of box fully professional tools in order to help large
corporations to reduce their software investments.
Our problem is in the last three years many open source tools used the EMF
with GMF framework in order to directly compete with existing vendors by
adding many professional features. The result is that the monetized
modeling plugin market is impossible today and that for example we can't
pay high level consultant such you Ed, or even add free contributors
members to this group because the generated revenue is too small. This is
why today Eclipse is non monetized market and I hope this will finally
change.
Omondo is using two plugins which are EMF and GEF. We refuse to use GMF.
Now be sure that we will not contribute to any EMF project because we
don't agree with the global project technical orientation which is more to
compete UML that provide real value and because other open source projects
would reuse it and provide it for free to our end users. It is therefore
breaking our existing market. There are over 5,000 bugs inside EMF as soon
as you try to develop an advanced and professional solution. Omondo did
pay the price to fix them and we will certainly not give them to our open
source competitors today.
Sorry about that we like to play the rules but not to be stupid.
Concerning GMF it is different because we just don't see any interest to
use it. GMF is helping to reduce development cost when building an UML
tool and this is today used by all the open source projects. We consider
that only native integration to EMF and GEF can generate technological
value and adding and intermediate stage in the middle is major problem for
scalability, live synchronization or for full project life cycle modeling
keeping the same UML Id. It is not possible today to keep all these
advanced features because of all these transformation stages. Except to
reduce time to market development in order to compete tools there is no
other interest in GMF.
Concerning GEF this project is just fantastic and don't really need
additional support.
My previous post was concerning the change that IBM acquisition have on
the market. For me the professional open source tool market providers is
dead because the real need is to build value on the top of existing
frameworks and not to try to reduce large corporations software expenses.
If EMF and GMF goal are only to compete with UML or existing tool vendors
then be sure that these projects will not find many support from larger
corporations and will sooner or later stop supporting them.
It is still time to change this EMF and GMF none sense strategy and be
more positive. We need stable frameworks to add value on the top of them
and not hundred of new open sources projects trying to compete with us.
Eclipse foundation has given too much marketing to these projects and made
end users believe that they don't need anymore traditional ISV vendors.
I will never agree with this vision and financial institution which are
currently helping IBM to acquire Sun have the same vision.
WE NEED TO MONETIZED ECLIPSE.