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Sun Microsystems Inc. on Wednesday said it has decided pass on the IBM-sponsored Eclipse consortium working to deliver an open-source application development environment.
Over the summer, Sun officials acknowledged that the company had been invited to join the Eclipse consortium and that Sun was considering the offer. However, the Santa Clara, Calif., Unix systems supplier today issued a statement declining the invitation.
In a statement on the issue, Sun said: “As you may know, Eclipse.org is meeting today in Dallas. At that meeting, it will be confirmed that Sun has declined to join Eclipse.org. In addition, since a common ground that would allow an equitable share in mutual development could not be found, hybrid options such as merging NetBeans.org with Eclipse.org will not be pursued. Sun will continue to work with industry partners to attempt to achieve alignment and interoperability in the Java Tools market.”
NetBeans is Suns own open source development platform and the foundation for Suns own development tools and some supporters.
“Sun and Eclipse have been holding considerable goodwill discussions and doing due diligence on the matter, so you can be assured that Suns decision was not made lightly,” Sun said in its statement.
Indeed, “As an open source tools platform, NetBeans is at its strongest point ever, with an average of 12,500 downloads per day of NetBeans 3.5.1, and increased investment in development as illustrated by a well-received roadmap for NetBeans 4.0,” the Sun statement added.