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Oh how I wish I could take back my vote. I clicked the plus by accident. This is clearly spam.

It's ironic how a post to the mailing list could immediately push this to the front page. =P

I don't think this is spam. The blog is clearly affiliated with MyEclipse, so no surprise it defends the product. But on the other hand it gives indication to what you should consider when choosing a tool. Many people forgot to consider that time is money when speaking about support.

Note that I do not defend MyEclipse itself, I'm not affiliated with Genuitec nor even a user, but I think that being a software company is not easy nowadays, and thus I do not consider providing argumented point of view like jenseck did should be considered as spam (but social filtering will say if it makes its way through front page).

While I don't think it's spam to the same level as penny st0ck and c1alis spam, it's still an article crafted to push this product and submitted by someone affiliated.

And it appears that I'm the only one who considers this submission suspect. :)

My main issue with the article is how difficult it is to read with the background image and white text. =)

The truth hurts, doesn't it?
He might be building up to a single line plugging his own product, but that doesn't make his statements any less true.

And no, I don't use his product. Tried it out some time ago and didn't see the point of it.

I've used Eclipse for years after MyEclipse. I have never paid for support (after using and getting rid of MyEclipse).
I just merely use forums and programming blogs for any help that I needed. (Yes, I have worked for and continue to work for Fortune 500 companies)

Personally, I found this interesting "food for thought". Sure jense has a bit of an agenda, but at least he doesn't try to hide it since the link is clearly marked "MyEclipse Blog". Even so, I didn't find any inaccuracies in the examples given. He's seems to simply be trying to make the point that one needs to be aware of "total cost", and I've found woefully few developers that are. I guess his ideas resonated with me as I recently had to reprimand one of my developers for spending the better part of his day jacking around with Eclipse plugins rather than working on our E-Commerce system. At our very large company, fully-overheaded costs are something like $200/hour. Time wasted really is money folks. Even if it's not yours, the person with the purse will eventually come calling. They always do.

"At our very large company, fully-overheaded costs are something like $200/hour. Time wasted really is money folks. Even if it's not yours, the person with the purse will eventually come calling. They always do."

"Wasting time" on learning isn't something limited to something free like Eclipse. I've "wasted time" with Visual Studio, JBuilder, IDEA, and other proprietary editors.

Yes, the initial cost of learning something new is always high. However, if the long term savings will eventually compensate for it - why not? and o yeah - once you learn something like riding a bike, you typically don't have to relearn it (no recurring cost).

cha0sth3ory said:
" 'Wasting time' on learning isn't something limited to something free like Eclipse. I've "wasted time" with Visual Studio, JBuilder, IDEA, and other proprietary editors."

Learning something germane to the development with which we're tasked is never wasting time. In fact, as the project lead I encourage my team to improve their skills constantly and that includes getting better with the tools we use. But this wasn't "learning". This was playing with something he found personally interesting. We already have a sanctioned development environment that easily enables us to perform everything we need to do. No matter what he "discovered", we would not be using it anyway since it hasn't been approved. We have a group that periodically performs tool evaluations and he's not part of it. So, what he did really was a waste of company time (and therefore money) since he wasn't improving his development skills with either the tools we use or within the domain we write.

cha0sth3ory said:
"Yes, the initial cost of learning something new is always high. However, if the long term savings will eventually compensate for it - why not?

I would agree with you if the "learning" was applicable to the types of development we do. But, we're not a "tools company". So, trying to build a piecemeal IDE, rather than developing what we need, isn't learning. Or at least it's not useful learning that our company wants to pay for. Playing with tools might be an interesting hobby. Using tools to build our products is what we expect our professional developers to do.

cha0sth3ory said:
"and o yeah - once you learn something like riding a bike, you typically don't have to relearn it (no recurring cost)."

But piecing together an IDE from a bunch of unrelated plugins has a huge recurring cost. Every time a new plugin is released and every time a new Eclipse version is released the "manual reintegration and retest" must happen yet again. So, it's not like riding a bike. It's more like getting something to eat; it happens again, and again, and again. Always at an ever increasing cost of time and money.

"This was playing with something he found personally interesting. We already have a sanctioned development environment that easily enables us to perform everything we need to do. No matter what he "discovered", we would not be using it anyway since it hasn't been approved."

vi and notepad enables everyone to perform what they need to do. This doesn't mean learning Visual Studio or Eclipse is a waste of time. Plus you're making one very strong assumption. What if the individual in question: was part of the committee that determines what tools are good (which I was and still am), learned this on his free time (which is common since a lot of programmers enjoy what they do), got sick of having to deal with a committee (most likely a telecom or financial company) and got a job where his tool was in use, or what if the free software in questoin was company sanctioned software? The main point is that free software does not have hidden costs that are any different from non-free proprietary software (and it does have clear savings).

"But, we're not a "tools company". So, trying to build a piecemeal IDE, rather than developing what we need, isn't learning."

hmmm I didn't think installing plugins for a working IDE was akin to building one from scratch... Also how can a developer expect to grow and evolve without - "playing"? This applies to tools, libraries, and languages...

Maybe it has something to do with our age differences but I can't help but feel that you sound like a VB6 or Cobol dev (you probably aren't but you sound ancient).

"But piecing together an IDE from a bunch of unrelated plugins has a huge recurring cost. Every time a new plugin is released and every time a new Eclipse version is released the "manual reintegration and retest" must happen yet again."

Like I said before you don't have to install any plugins and if you do install you don't have to install the latest and greatest every time they come out (that's a bit assinine). Moreover, the Eclipse Foundation (and probably other IDEs) have a solution to this problem: http://www.eclipse.org/callisto/.