Never to be Eclipsed by Microsoft

Summary: Mike Milinkovich wants to see peers leaving Eclipse and the fracturing of this community is a subject Boycott Novell covered and warned about before

SOME people argue that to be outspoken (or honest) is to be a bad person. We addressed this fallacy in the past [1, 2]. So, just to give an example, if a person tells Microsoft "No", that one person might then be portrayed as "poisonous", "zealot", or "hater" (that third one is one of Microsoft's favourite labels these days and Novell started using it too).

Given that Milinkovich offered "hearty congratulations" to Microsoft when it pushed XAML via Eclipse (an attack on Web standards), should one truly sympathise upon his complaints/departure? He seems to have been pivotal in Microsoft's arrival at the project and he later welcomed Microsoft. Now he is being pushed out and one of our readers comments as follows:

Dunno, is Matt [Asay] trying to help paint the bad guys as good and vice versa?

Eclipse, like Apache, has been under attack, and a textbook play from Microsoft has been to attack the messenger. Negative messages must obviously, according to their reasoning, be because the messenger is inherently negative, not, god forbid, because the Microsoft people have done anything worthy of criticism.

It's also a textbook play from Microsoft to drive out the talented and dedicated workers. Look at the Norwegian standards committee, for an example. They all quit in protest. And like, with Apache or Eclipse, Microsoft was glad to have the extra seats.

Microsoft is still trying to invade Eclipse (for "developers developers developers developers," many of whom are using GNU/Linux on their desktops). It is worth keeping an eye on who grabs the vacant seats (if any), teaches experience. Microsoft dabbles in its direct competition merely to divide, distract, and change the agenda. Java is a good example. ⬆

"Don’t encourage new, cross-platform Java classes, especially don’t help get great Win 32 implementations written/deployed. [...] Do encourage fragmentation of the Java classlib space."

--Ben Slivka, Microsoft