Novell to Join Eclipse

NEW YORK—Novell Inc. said the company will join the Eclipse open-source consortium, thus furthering its commitment to the open-source development model.

The Provo, Utah, company made the announcement at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo 2004 here Wednesday.

While Sun Microsystems Inc. continues to mull over its potential involvement with Eclipse, Novell has moved decisively to support Eclipse as a way to deliver a common tooling strategy for Novell developers going forward and to provide a consistent platform for building, testing and debugging applications across the Novell product line.

Novell made serious investments in the open-source community to the tune of $250 million when it acquired SuSE Linux and Ximian last year.

"As we continue to drive forward our Linux strategy and enhance our secure identity management and Web services offerings, one of the missing components has been a unified development environment for working across Novell technologies," Chris Stone, Novell vice chairman, said in a statement. "Eclipse fills that missing gap. We now endorse and support Eclipse as the integrated development environment of choice for all Novell products."

At an event at Harvard University last weekend, Stone said regarding Novells open-source investments: "The open-source development model is something we believe in, and we also believe in the ability to make money at it. … We spent $250 million buying a couple of companies [SuSE Linux and Ximian] and we want to try to recoup that."

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For more on Harvard Universitys Cyberposium, read "Industry Leaders Have Open Debate."

Participation in Eclipse is free for now, and it signals a growth of commitment for Novell, observers said.

"The appeal of Eclipse from a developers point of view is the ability to combine the tools and features you want, the way you want them, and have them work together seamlessly," Chris Cooper, Novells director of developer services, said in a statement. "With the addition of Eclipse plug-ins, developing solutions based on Novell technologies will become much more uniform, quick and efficient, increasing the attractiveness of Novell platforms for both independent developers and in-house corporate IT staff."