Eclipse or Netbeans

My two favorite IDE (Integrated Development Environment) are Eclipse and Netbeans.
The beauty of Eclipse is that it can be downloaded, unzipped and its ready to go! Also its CVS and SVN features are excellent. However, off-late, I have been using Netbeans more often. And after the 6.0 released netbeans has totally taken me off the Eclipse.

I have been thinking why Eclipse has fallen behind Netbeans? In my personal opinion, its because of the differences in backers' commitment.

Netbeans is backed, sponsored and supported by Sun, while IBM has been backing Eclipse.

Sun is committed to Netebeans while IBM is involved in Eclipse. (You may have heard the "English Breakfast" joke umpteen times that, in an egg-and-beacon breakfast the hen is involved while the pig is totally committed).

Sun is consolidating all its IDE into Netbeans and is also providing commercial support. Also ALL of Sun software IP (Intellectual Property) is mandated to be open sourced by its CEO. This includes its chip design Ultrasprac, which is its bread earner. This what I call commitment.

While IBM is involved in open source, I am yet to see it fully committed. In fact, after receiving nagging mail to stop using the software I downloaded, I have stopped using Aphaworks. In-spite of the fact that it has wonderful works, I refrain from using them. Having said that, I do appreciate IBM having donated Cloudscape database to Apache. I look forward to the day when IBM totally commits itself to open source.

Finally, netbeans is integrated in true sense of the word, while Eclipse is fragmented. I have a feeling that somehow Eclipse got left behind; as (I may be wrong) IBM has committed itself to Visual Age. Also the Visual Age page does not mentions Eclipse!

Thus I would rather stick with netbeans rather than being going with Eclipse.