The Eclipse Foundation's board of directors will name
former Oracle executive Mike Milinkovich as its executive
director.
The foundation had been formed in an effort to make the
open-source tools platform more independent of its founder,
IBM.
Previously a vice president of Oracle technical services,
Milinkovich will focus on building the Eclipse Foundation
membership; overseeing the launch of the upcoming Eclipse 3.0
release this summer; and building upon the WebTools project, which
extends Eclipse on the Java server side. Milinkovich also will form
an Eclipse management organisation.
"I'm very excited to take this challenge on," Milinkovich said.
"I think Eclipse has done an excellent job to date in getting
presence in the marketplace."
While major companies such as Oracle and IBM participate in
Eclipse, Sun Microsystems, BEA Systems, and Microsoft do not.
Milinkovich said he would be open to having them join.
"I'm willing to talk to them whenever they're willing to talk,"
Milinkovich said. Their participation could make for development
of more products on top of Eclipse as well as better integration,
he said.
Eclipse 3.0, meanwhile, will feature a refresh of the Eclipse
Java toolset, focusing on look and feel improvements. Also planned
for the release is a C language development toolset and
introduction of a rich client framework for building rich client
applications in Java using Simple Widget Toolkit.
Before working at Oracle, Milinkovich worked at WebGain, a
founding member of Eclipse.
Paul Krill writes for InfoWorld
