Google, Eclipse, & Open Source

Open source may not be important enough for Google to release the code of many of its own applications and platforms. But the company nonetheless places a premium on supporting open source development by third parties, as it showed late last week when it donated $20,000 to support the Eclipse IDE project.

...regardless of Google’s somewhat peculiar and complex stance on open source, the company clearly realizes that ensuring the health of key open source projects like Eclipse is vital to its own well being. Why? For starters, of course, because Google relies heavily on some open source technologies itself. It wouldn’t have gone very far at all without Linux and Apache to power its servers, after all, and Android is the sine qua non of Google’s foray into the mobile world.