Although Eclipse was once an IBM project, nowadays it is the Eclipse Foundation that is behind it. The Eclipse foundation is funded, it seems, by IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Red Hat, Huawei and many others.
Is this essentially a VS Code fork? Are they not happy with VS Code? After using Eclipse for everything for ages, I moved completely to VS Code. Like Eclipse, it is really well put together, as many would agree with me.
I'm not sure why the project exists. I assume they want to take the development into a direction that would not be possible with the MS-led VS Code?
Edit: Found the answer: "Eclipse Theia is an open and vendor-neutral project with a diverse community of contributors from large corporations down to small companies and even individual developers. This diverse and steadily growing community is a stable base for the ongoing development of additional features and maintenance of existing functionality based on a broad and balanced view of the requirements put forward by the Theia adopters. The commercial-friendly licensing and the rigorous underlying IP management ensures that adopters can safely build commercial and internal products based on Theia." [https://theia-ide.org/docs/project_goals/]
Theia reuses some components (like the Monaco code editor), but the reason it looks and feels a lot like VSCode is mostly that they decided to copy it.
They explain the reasons for creating a VSCode clone here [1]. In short, they don't consider VSCode to be fully open source, and Theia wants the code to be both free and unencumbered by Microsoft's licensing and proprietary code, and also available to commercial vendors to use as the foundation for commercial products. That includes an open extension system that isn't owned by anyone, unlike Microsoft's marketplace.
Secondly, Theia is two things. One is an IDE positioned to compete with VSCode and every other IDE out there. The other is as an extensible platform to build IDEs, either open source or proprietary. This is exactly the same strategy as the Eclipse platform, except built in web tech.
This earlier HN discussion has a lot more discussion [2].
I think the Eclipse people could have communicated all of this a lot better. When you put a VSCode clone in front of developers, your first task needs to be to explain how it's not a fork, and why it exists. The Theia site's front page [3] doesn't even mention VSCode by name.
There was a period of time, in mid-late 2010s, when I was hopelessly looking for a web-based IDE that supported programming in Java. There was cloud9 for web programming, but it didn't have Java support. There was Eclipse Che and Theia which were apparently related in some way, but I could never figure out how exactly. They however (Che at least), were painful to install and more importantly required Docker to work, and docker required minimum Linux kernel version 3, while the cheap VPS providers I could afford supported this OpenVZ thing with a patched 2.6.whatever kernel version.... Poooff!
Fast forward to 2022: I finally found VS Code Server by Coder.com, a nice, well-documented project with support for Java and many more languages, and that without docker. OpenVZ has moved beyond obsolete kernel versions, and most VPS providers offer KVM machines with decent prices anyway. Happy seeing this progress :)
By the way, I still don't know how are Che and Theia (and Eclipse, and VSCode it seems) are related to each other.
Maybe a bit petty but does anyone use Eclipse anymore other than companies that want to make their own IDE? Didn’t Eclipse miss the Electron-ish* lightweight IDE train?
Good for them for evolving but… if a tree falls in a forest…
*I know there are lots of arguments against Electron vs native but clearly Eclipse of any generation faced similar concerns.
Is this essentially a VS Code fork? Are they not happy with VS Code? After using Eclipse for everything for ages, I moved completely to VS Code. Like Eclipse, it is really well put together, as many would agree with me.
I'm not sure why the project exists. I assume they want to take the development into a direction that would not be possible with the MS-led VS Code?
Edit: Found the answer: "Eclipse Theia is an open and vendor-neutral project with a diverse community of contributors from large corporations down to small companies and even individual developers. This diverse and steadily growing community is a stable base for the ongoing development of additional features and maintenance of existing functionality based on a broad and balanced view of the requirements put forward by the Theia adopters. The commercial-friendly licensing and the rigorous underlying IP management ensures that adopters can safely build commercial and internal products based on Theia." [https://theia-ide.org/docs/project_goals/]