The Eclipse project ecosystem is an interesting place… it’s like a large playground with monkey bars, tether ball and swing sets. This playground is also full of diverse participants. However, what happens when two children in this playground fight? For example, two children both want to play in the same sandbox but there’s only room for one due to their egos or some political reasons. Does one kid push the other out of the sandbox, do both go blind by kicking sand in each others eyes or do they just happily play together?
I bring this issue up (and cheesy metaphor) because we will have another case of this type of competition soon within the Eclipse project ecosystem… and I just wanted to hear people’s opinions.
In the past, we had this happen with two Subversion projects (Subclipse and Subversive)… one was left standing… and in the end, were we better off with this type of competition? Did the community win or lose on this one? You decide 🙂
Personally, I’ve always been a big fan of natural selection and Darwinian evolution:
I say, let open-source projects figure things out as long as they don’t kick sand in the eyes of people living outside their sandbox. In the end, the better project should win or the competing projects will find a way to work together.