Is Eclipse de-emphasizing Java and refocusing on some of the other languages that we talked about? Is it focusing on some of the scripting languages as well as on .Net while de-emphasizing Java?

I wouldn't say we're de-emphasizing Java. As Eclipse is growing and there's more projects joining the fold, there are more resources to take on more languages and more platforms. Now, almost every Eclipse project writes its code in Java. We're clearly heavy users of Java. But in terms of Java being the only platform or language that we support within Eclipse, that's never been the vision for Eclipse. It's always been about supporting as many languages and as many platforms as we can find people willing to work on projects for.

There's been some talk in the industry that Java is kind of yesterday's technology. Sun wouldn't like to hear that, but do you see it that way at all?

I kind of frankly take that stuff with a grain of salt. You know, there's this constant hype machine within the high-tech industry that the next shiny new thing is going to be the grand vision that's going to do everything that has never been done before. What my observation is, is that Java is now getting to the point where it's clearly mature enough and stable enough to meet the needs of mainstream enterprise development and I think that's a good thing. Maturity isn't something to be ashamed of. It's something that the people that are talking about the shiny new things should treat with respect.

I guess there's kind of a trend toward putting the virtual machine on other languages.

Yes, and I think that's a great idea. Well, I think what you're saying is there's a trend toward opening up the JVMs (Java Virtual Machines) to make it easier to support other languages. And I think that's a great idea.

Why?

Because the programmers want more than one language, but there's so much work and talent that's been invested in the runtime infrastructure that's part of the Java platform, that reinventing all of that technology for another language doesn't make any sense. You want to have a particular problem, which can be expressed more easily in a language other than Java, that's great. But you don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water. I mean you still want to be able to use this highly-tuned and mature runtime platform from companies like BEA and IBM and JBoss and Oracle that have spent years perfecting this middleware infrastructure for Web applications. You don't want to throw that out just because you want [to] program in another language.

How much money would you estimate is being generated by Eclipse-based software or is it still the main attraction to Eclipse is it's all free?

MM: I wish we actually had good numbers on trying to estimate the size of the Eclipse ecosystem. I'm quite confident that it's in the billion-dollar range and probably more, but we just don't have the hard numbers in terms of sizing that market. Unfortunately we haven't been able to get an analyst to actually spend the time to quantify those numbers. But what you said about the attraction to Eclipse being free, the economics of the Eclipse model is a little bit different than that, because the Eclipse community as a whole is almost uniquely focused on enabling a commercially profitable ecosystem or market around the free platform. So yes, we do provide open source tools and frameworks from Eclipse and those are provided for free. But we definitely are motivated across the Eclipse ecosystem to see people and companies make money from the Eclipse platform.

What's going on with Eclipse as far as application lifecycle management? Some of that's on the agenda here, but could you maybe give a synopsis of what's going on there?

Sure. There's several different projects going on at Eclipse in the area. Serena is leading a project called ALF, Application Lifecycle Framework, and Compuware is leading a project called Corona. And these are both projects that are in fairly early days, they're both in incubation. But application lifecycle management is an area where we see definite growth at Eclipse, but it's going to take some time for these projects to mature and really hit their stride.