A.1. Eclipse

Eclipse is an open source IDE that was originally created by IBM to replace its aging Visual Age for Java product. IBM’s goal is stated as follows:

We wanted to establish a common platform for all IBM development products to avoid duplicating the most common elements of infrastructure. This would allow customers using multiple tools built by different parts of IBM to have a more integrated experience as they switched from one tool to another. We envisioned the customer’s complete development environment to be composed of a heterogeneous combination of tools from IBM, the customer’s custom toolbox, and third-party tools. This heterogeneous, but compatible, tool environment was the inception of a software tools ecosystem.^[1]

^[1] http://mng.bz/pmPo