This week, Borland made some very audacious moves when they announced an acquisition of Segue and a divestiture of their IDE tools business. As others have commented, this does not mean the end of JBuilder or Delphi, but these are certainly bold and strategic moves.
I can still recall using TurboPascal almost twenty years ago and thinking it was one of the coolest things I’d ever seen. Borland’s contribution to our industry have been large, and I believe that they deserve a great deal of recognition for what they’ve accomplished for developers everywhere with Delphi, JBuilder and other products.
From what I’ve seen of the commentary so far on Borland’s announcement, it appears that many are missing a key point: from everything we’ve seen and read, the future of Borland will be based on Eclipse technology. Last March, Borland announced that it was going to be moving all of their lifecycle tools onto the Eclipse platform and they’ve been working on that since. Many of their tools such as the clients for Together, CaliberRM and StarTeam have been built on Eclipse for quite some time. Borland has, and continues, to generate significant revenue from products based on the Eclipse technology.
It is important to realize that Eclipse has created a strong, growing and diverse ecosystem. Companies like Borland exemplify how they can work with the open source community, build on a standard framework, and provide commercial innovations for the benefit of the industry and customers.
Borland’s contribution to Eclipse remains strong. Just recently Borland and IBM proposed that they co-lead a top-level project at Eclipse to consolidate the many modeling-related projects at Eclipse. The GMF project led by Richard Gronback of Borland has a great community building around it and starting to release some pretty exciting code.
To date, Borland has not been involved in the Application Lifecycle Framework project. However, Segue has been involved for some time. I am hopeful that going forward, Borland will continue and build upon Segue’s investment there and become a full participant in the project.
