

Google Donates $20,000 to Eclipse Foundation - glazemaster
http://www.thepowerbase.com/2012/09/google-donates-20000-to-eclipse-foundation/

======
justinsb
For those complaining that Google should have donated more, that's just
ridiculous. Google already does donate more; they support the Eclipse
Foundation financially.

There are performance issues being reported in the latest Eclipse, and it
emerged that automated performance tests that used to be run are not currently
being run because there aren't machines available. Google steps up - within 48
hours - with more than enough cash to solve the problem.

The problem needed a small amount of resources now, rather than a huge
donation in three months time. A bigger donation might not even have solved
this problem - obviously there was some resource allocation failure in the
first place.

As an Eclipse user, let me say: thank you, Google.

~~~
lifeguard
From The Fine Article:

"Within 48 hours of Mike’s post, a representative of Google’s Open Source
Programs Office let the developers know they would be taking up his challenge
of helping getting the performance tests running again"

That is awesome. Many companies could not get 20k approved for an internal
project in that amount of time.

Thank you Google!

------
ConstantineXVI
Note that the $20K was for hardware, not people.

Google also has a few devs pushing code into Eclipse, so it's not like
Google's been ignoring them all this time.
[http://dash.eclipse.org/dash/commits/web-app/commit-count-
lo...](http://dash.eclipse.org/dash/commits/web-app/commit-count-loc.php)

~~~
solox3
The title could have been "Google Donates $20,000 [worth of equipment] to
Eclipse Foundation"

------
georgemcbay
I ran into the "Juno is ridiculously slow" thing myself (mentioned it just
yesterday here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4488005>).

Running Juno on my work laptop (a recent ThinkPad i5 system) is close to
unusably slow while 3.8 runs great (for a Java UI-heavy app).

Hopefully this helps sort things out (though donating time of Google engineers
might be a better practical solution). In any case, I think I'll stick with
Sublime Text 2 for Android development when doing anything other than on-
device debugging.

~~~
cageface
The community edition of IntelliJ makes a great Android development
environment and is free. I can't imagine doing Android dev in a straight text
editor.

~~~
vineet
I love IntelliJ, but I keep coming back to Eclipse because of all the plugins
available for it. I would love to see IntelliJ somehow build the 3rd-party
community of plugin developers.

~~~
cageface
What plugins do you use? Is this for Android?

~~~
chmod775
I thought there already is android-sdk integration in IntelliJ

~~~
cageface
There is. It doesn't have all the features of Eclipse for Android but it's
everything you need. I haven't touched Eclipse so far.

------
activepeanut
I'm really annoyed with the people looking a gift horse in the mouth in this
thread.

~~~
nullymcnull
Eclipse is the primary and recommended dev environment for Android, and it's
quite a sluggish beast. This is no gift horse. It's a spoonful of charity
where several metric tonnes are called for.

~~~
myko
Did you read the article? Google donates quite a bit to Eclipse in money and
man power. This one time donation was specific to a need for new machines
_today_.

------
vineet
I am a fan of how much Google has put in Eclipse. I think Google employees are
on the Eclipse board, they pay Eclipse committers, and might be one of the
bigger contributors to the foundation.

However, I do think that Google (and most companies) should step it up even
more. Consider how many employees Google has using Eclipse, and how many
products Google has building on Eclipse. They are doing a lot with Eclipse and
should contribute a lot.

Yes, Eclipse is open source, and companies do not need to contribute to it.
But the benefits of open source is a lot more than the free price, it is the
freedom to improve bugs that affect your development, and most importantly the
freedom to make sure that some single company is not leading the
product/project in a strange direction.

I do think that every company that uses Eclipse as an IDE for its employees
should have a moral obligation to donate $500 (the typical price of an IDE) to
the Eclipse Foundation. And if you are building a product on top of Eclipse,
then perhaps 10% of the $500 per user of your product.

Yes, I know I am asking for a lot. Yes, donating to the foundation does
include the full time salaries of committers. Yes, there are more companies
than Google that need to be doing this. And, yes, I do fear that the tragedy
of the commons is to be expected by default for any successful open source
project.

~~~
sp332
As was mentioned in this thread 2 hours ago, Google has 9 committers to
Eclipse. [http://dash.eclipse.org/dash/commits/web-app/commit-count-
lo...](http://dash.eclipse.org/dash/commits/web-app/commit-count-loc.php)
They've also paid members of the foundation for over 6 years. And there is
never a moral obligation to pay for something that is explicitly licensed for
free.

~~~
dillona
> And there is never a moral obligation to pay for something that is
> explicitly licensed for free.

I was with you up until that part. In my opinion there is a moral obligation
to donate to projects if you are using them for commercial gain.

------
lanna
"a number of users reported significant performance issues when using the 4.2
release, compared to identical setups running the older 3.8"

3.8 is not older than 4.2, they were released together.

~~~
Evbn
Well this is the first 4.x release to the general public, compared to the old
stable 3.x platform.

------
mtgx
They should donate a lot more, and actually get them to make a version that is
highly optimized for building Android apps. It should be like "Eclipse for
Android", rather than just "Eclipse for Java", with an Android development
add-on, as it is now.

~~~
cdibona
You guys do know we've been paying members of the foundation for going on 6
years or so? This was an additional outlay for some hardware.

~~~
paulgb
I think the silent majority understands this. The vocal minority will always
complain that _others_ charity isn't enough.

~~~
sliverstorm
Yup, the good 'ol:

Person1: "They should donate so much more that that! God they are such penny-
pinchers."

(Person1 donates nothing)

------
programminggeek
So, less than one developer year? That is incredibly generous.

------
homakov
eclipse is ridiculously slow IDE. Let me change letters for you: DIE.

------
twapi
$20K? just 20K. :(

------
duked
Woah 20k$ I mean it's like .... Like ... Ridiculous !

------
rshm
20K is too less coming from Google. They have thousands of developers
benefiting from the ide and Android + Google tools use eclipse as well.

~~~
ConstantineXVI
I'd be very surprised if there weren't at least a few Eclipse committers
inside Google.

EDIT: In fact, they have nine. [http://dash.eclipse.org/dash/commits/web-
app/commit-count-lo...](http://dash.eclipse.org/dash/commits/web-app/commit-
count-loc.php)

