Open-source Eclipse names first director

Oracle executive Mike Milinkovich is named the first executive director since Eclipse gained independence from IBM earlier this year.

Martin LaMonica Former Staff writer, CNET News

Martin LaMonica is a senior writer covering green tech and cutting-edge technologies. He joined CNET in 2002 to cover enterprise IT and Web development and was previously executive editor of IT publication InfoWorld.

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Martin LaMonica

May 28, 2004 12:05 p.m. PT

The Eclipse Foundation, an open-source group, has named a former Oracle executive as its first executive director since it gained independence from IBM.

Mike Milinkovich, who previously was vice president of Oracle's application server technical services, is slated to become executive director of Eclipse on Tuesday. The appointment follows the creation in February of a nonprofit organization in place of the consortium that IBM founded in 2001 under the same name. Until January, IBM executive Skip McGaughey had been the chairman.



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Eclipse software provides a system for letting different tools plug into a single programming application. Use of Eclipse software among developers has shot up in the past year, and the group now has more than 50 members, including tools and application providers.

Hear what Eclipse hopes to accomplish in the coming months

Milinkovich said in a statement that his top priorities as executive director include shipping the Eclipse 3.0 software in the early summer and the launch of a Web Tools Platform Project for improving Web development tools. He also said he intends to form a management organization to supervise the planning of Eclipse projects.

Milinkovich, who has experience with object-oriented programming, also worked at The Object People, whose flagship product, TopLink, was ultimately acquired by Oracle in 2002. TopLink is a tool for getting data out of relational databases with object-oriented programming languages.