I appreciate the followup. I realize my original post may have sounded flip, let me clarify:

These companies spend a small fortune funding development efforts internally, whether it be R&D or core development (like bug fixes). When they propose a new project and become the leading and directing voice of that project, the employees that are assigned to that project have to walk a fine line between making the project valuable to the community and keeping the company’s best interests at heart. The project has to be good enough to service the community, but not *so* good that it completely degrades the value of the commercial offering. I’m sure every single company contributing to Eclipse walks this line every day.

Because of this conflict of interest, I think either knowingly or unknowingly there are either bugs left in or features left on TODO lists indefinitely for the sole purpose that the host company doesn’t want to pay to have their feature set chewed away.

I’m not saying anything sinister is going on, just the reality of the situation of having commercial companies lead their own open source projects that (to some degree) compete with their own commercial tools.

Eclipse never had to deliver the moon to be successful, it just had to deliver something between garbage and top-level commercial offers… for *free* to get the communities attention. Creating the Foundation to pull in the monetary interests of big companies was brilliant for the longevity of the project. I really don’t see how else Eclipse could have grown as fast as it did or survive as long as it will if it hadn’t been for that decision.

I think the fact that Android is following a similar model speaks to how well it worked. Pure Open Source can’t solve a lot of problems and pure closed source can’t solve a lot of problems… but existing in this mish-mash gray area is an awesome consolidation of the strengths of both sides… but you also get some of the weaknesses from those sides mixed in as well (like what I mentioned above).

So back to the Android issue, I think when you look at companies like Motorola, Spring, T-Mo, etc. that all have billions of dollars invested in R&D in both software but more specifically have a huge revenue stream coming from *services* in the future years, thinking that Company X might charter and deliver a shoddy GPS/Maps component or a sub-optimal media player to the base Android platform so their commercial offering still shines is not outlandish.

I do agree that companies in the Eclipse ecosystem build value added products on top of Eclipse projects. We actually think that is goodness and creates a vibrant ecosystem. I am pretty sure Google would like to see the same for Android.

Ian Skerrett
Eclipse Foundation

I don’t expect a 1.0 release of anything to nail everything on the head, but given the momentum behind the project and resources, I certainly think they can go from “OK” to “Awesome” pretty quickly.