Genuitec Addresses Customer Concerns about Eclipse Open Source Plugins

Genuitec, LLC recently announced that it had received feedback regarding a number of customer concerns about the use of Eclipse Open Source (News - Alert) plugins. The company is one of the key members of the Eclipse Foundation and wanted to address these concerns.

Some of the feedback from Genuitec customers have highlighted the fact that Eclipse.org had removed support from its sites for last year's Eclipse; which meant that enterprises standardized using stable Eclipse versions would have to search and find archives of Mylyn and other projects; popular plugins created by one or two people sometimes forget to pay their DNS bill, so the software becomes unavailable or lost; Open Source software is sometimes bought and taken off the market, or returns with a price tag (News - Alert) and some small shops change web hosting providers, and enterprise developers can no longer find where their favorite plugins are stored.

In a release, Tim Webb, product manager for SDC said, “Open Source developers are the most important members of the software community, and some have contributed to the greatest projects the Internet has ever seen. Though many popular projects, like AnyEdit, FindBugs and similar community driven projects are often operated by only one or a few architects who at a moment's notice could remove the software intentionally or otherwise.”

Genuitec has a solution called Secure Delivery Center that has a number of enterprising features. Some of these features include the ability to manage the tools behind the firewall in your “private cloud”; Lock down” Eclipse-based tool stacks with one click; Generate full, customized installers for tool stacks; Easy usage reporting on tools and open source compliance; Manage multiple versions of software simultaneously and Manage Eclipse, MyEclipse or both at once

Webb went on to say, “The problem is that these projects have come to a level of usage that is mission-critical in the enterprise. This has led us to provide our users with the most popular Eclipse packages, locked down, with each version number, inside the company firewall where outside forces can’t interrupt the business work flow.”