Microsoft joins open source Eclipse Foundation, announces new tools and services

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Even though Microsoft has been against the use of open source for a long time, the company has finally ‘changed its mind’ by becoming an official member of open source Eclipse Foundation which for a long time had Microsoft listed as one of the most important companies that were not members of the open source.

According to a blog post by Visual Studio Team general manager Shanku Niyogi, Microsoft had already collaborated with Eclipse some time ago in order to help all customers using Microsoft services such as Visual Studio Team Services and Microsoft Azure by improving their Java experience.

“Today, I'm happy to share that Microsoft is taking its relationship with the Eclipse community to the next level by joining the Eclipse Foundation as a Solutions Member. Joining the Eclipse Foundation enables us to collaborate more closely with the Eclipse community, deliver a great set of tools and services for all development teams, and continuously improve our cloud services, SDKs and tools,” Niyogi wrote.

It is not announced yet how much Microsoft will financially contribute to Eclipse which has several of its tools such as the Azure Toolkit for Eclipse, and Java SDK for Azure already offered by Microsoft. Currently the company offers Azure WebApp and will support the Azure IoT Suite in the Eclipse Kura framework for IoT.

“For Microsoft, this is another indication that they are embracing open source, and the open source community,” according to Eclipse executive director Mike Milinkovich. “For Eclipse it is a further validation of the new cloud-based tooling platforms our community is building. Seeing Microsoft's demo of Eclipse Che working seamlessly with Visual Studio Team Services was very cool,” expressed Milinkovich adding that Eclipse Che tool platform will do whatever it can to help Microsoft with its huge developer ecosystem.

“By becoming a member, those plug-ins will now be installable from the Eclipse Marketplace Client, extending their reach into the ecosystem of Eclipse developers,” explained Milinkovich.

It seems like the goal of Eclipse and Microsoft collaboration is to make Azure and Windows more attractive to a great number of developers, without putting much pressure on what language they know best but focusing on how they can improve their skills taking advantage of the best that is being offered to them.  

According to Niyogi, here are some of the announced tools and services for Java and Eclipse developers:

 

 


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