Free Eclipse Costs Over 100K per Seat Claims Microsoft Manager
By Angsuman Chakraborty, Gaea News NetworkTuesday, October 11, 2005
In the VSLive Conference in Orlando, BJ Holtgrewe, Senior Production Manager for Visual Studio made some outrageous claims like:
Holtgrewe’s chat was also peppered with competitive messages, noting that U.S. DevTracker found that 53 percent of software development is being done on .NET these days, leaving Java scrambling for the remainder of the pie.
Repeating the Microsoft mantra that “free is not really free,” the programmer showed that while the basic development environment for Eclipse is free versus a basic Visual Studio 2005 license, which costs $8,200, the cost of using Eclipse increases as users tap into load testing and other advanced features.
When he added it up, the cost of using VS 2005 was over $30,000 versus more than $100,000 for Eclipse-based applications.
Source: InternetNews
I am really interested to get a hold of the podcast; merely to see how the marketing geniuses at Microsoft can make such tall claims with a straight face.
Get over it Microsoft!
Eclipse is completely free and a mighty good product by all counts - it shines in individual as well as collaborative development, writing test case (with excellent support for TFD), integration with Application servers, integration with source control systems and tons of other well integrated features. Almost anything you can come up with - Eclipse probably has a plugin for it.
I have used it successfully for many years. Today Eclipse is a truly polished product and gives any IDE (free or costly or outrageously costly like Visual Studio) a run for its money.
BTW: Did I mention the upgrades are free too? - unlike Visual Studio
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February 9, 2006: 4:06 am
[...] Microsoft manager talked about the true cost of Eclipse, the popular “free” java IDE. His estimation was 100K per seat which I think is somewhat overblown. Nevertheless there is a high cost factor associated with open source software which includes (but not limited to) adapting and improving often poor quality product, understanding and documenting often poorly documented products, cost of support, maintenance, cost of security audit etc. [...] |
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October 13, 2005: 11:55 am
> it would have been nice of them to think about that say three years ago. Sure. What about the current situation? > your statment that a license for Visual Studio costs $8000 is completely false It is the statement of BJ Holtgrewe, Senior Production Manager for Visual Studio as said in VSLive. |
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October 13, 2005: 8:31 am
Eclipse still does not touch Visual Studio. Consider web development with Eclipse for a moment. There is absolutely no support for it in Eclipse. That’s half an IDE in my opinion. Sure, the WTP has come along to remedy this mess, but it would have been nice of them to think about that say three years ago. And if you want to talk about exaggerated claims, your statment that a license for Visual Studio costs $8000 is completely false. It is expensive, but costs about a quarter of what you claim above. This is just more partisan microsoft-bashing. |
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