Sun Won't Join IBM-Led Java Tools AllianceSun Won't Join IBM-Led Java Tools Alliance

Sun Microsystems and IBM continue to battle over Java as Sun Wednesday officially declined to join the IBM-led Eclipse.org open-source tools effort, a Sun executive said.

Instead, Santa Clara, Calif.-based Sun will continue to focus its efforts on the Sun-driven open-source group NetBeans.org, and the NetBeans tools framework, an open-source technology on which the company's own Java tools are based, said Joe Keller, vice president of Java Web services and tools marketing for Sun.

Keller said after months of negotiations, Sun and IBM could not "find a way for us to equitably share in mutual development" of the Eclipse and NetBeans frameworks. He said Sun hoped that the two companies could work together so that plug-ins to Eclipse also would seamlessly work with the NetBeans framework and vice versa, but an agreement could not be reached.

However, Keller said Sun is not against working with IBM and Eclipse.org if IBM "should find a way to modify their position."

Keller said Sun could not abandon NetBeans users when the framework has so much momentum, with an average of 12,500 downloads per day.

A representative from Eclipse.org, which is managed by a board of 40 vendors including IBM, could not be reached for comment on Sun's decision not to join Wednesday. However, an IBM spokesman said that the Eclipse framework receives as many as 30,000 download requests a day, and has the support of a slew of key industry vendors including Macromedia, Oracle, Sybase, Intel, Red Hat and Fujitsu.

IBM launched Eclipse.org in November 2001 as a way to allow multiple tools from different vendors to work in a shared environment through the Eclipse framework. IBM has since built its own WebSphere Java tools on the framework.

Eclipse initially was aimed to support only Java development but has branched out to support other languages and platforms, such as C++ and even Macintosh development, in the past two years.

Further complicating matters, leading Java tools vendor and Eclipse.org member Borland also offers a free, extensible architecture for integrating Java tools. In October, the company extended its OpenTools API to allow ISVs to plug tools into the framework for free without buying a license from Borland.

All of this in-fighting over a common framework for Java tools does nothing to help Sun's stated plan to grow the number of Java developers from 3 million to 10 million progress, observers said.

In fact, as the multitude of Java software vendors wrestle for control of the Java development community, Microsoft's position in the tools space, and consequently the adoption of the .Net platform, could grow even stronger.

IBM and Sun originally partnered closely to develop Java in the early days of the technology, but have since become foes over control of how the industry uses the technology. IBM, too, has cozied up to Microsoft in the development of Web services standards, a move that has further polarized it from Sun.

Currently, IBM has a clear lead over Sun in selling Java-based middleware, but Sun still controls Java licensing and oversees the Java Community Process, the panel of vendors that creates Java standards.