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Re: [ide-dev] [eclipse-dev] Why we dropped Eclipse in favour of IntelliJ | Java Code Geeks

I know there are a lot of contracting companies out there who do Eclipse work. I wonder, for a lot of companies, whether it would be easier for them to just cut a cheque and hire another company to work on the platform. Having people on staff doing this as we've usually done, isn't always the best business to be in. I know there are a few companies doing that, hell, we even have a contractor on staff at the moment helping with Qt support in CDT. But it would be great if it was co-ordinated more, IMHO.

From: John Arthorne <John_Arthorne@xxxxxxxxxx>
Reply-To: "General development mailing list of the Eclipse project." <eclipse-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Friday, 20 September, 2013 10:42 AM
To: "ide-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx" <ide-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx>, "eclipse-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx" <eclipse-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [eclipse-dev] [ide-dev] Why we dropped Eclipse in favour of IntelliJ | Java Code Geeks

> From: Marcel Bruch <bruch@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> The interesting part is that companies with thousands of developers
> that use JDT would benefit from every single minute their developers
> save with an improved Eclipse. Maybe it shouldn't be a single
> company but an interest group of 5-10 member companies? Small
> companies like ours can't sponsor but we can offer our services to
> help improving things in JDT's infrastructure as part of a long-term
> initiative.


This is a mystery to me too. If a company with 1000+ developers was considering switching from Eclipse to a commercial alternative, they could instead spend a fraction of that amount directly investing in the tools with a similar gain in productivity. As you say if 5-10 companies do this, the effect multiplies greatly. Not only that, it would give the company the expertise and influence to fix the problems or add the features that are most important to their own developers. There are a few enlightened big companies like Ericsson, Red Hat, and Pivotal that have been contributing to Platform and JDT recently and I hope others catch on. I would claim it doesn't even take a big investment. Some part time contributors in SWT, Platform UI, and JDT are having a noticeable impact already.

John

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