MM: I wish we actually had good numbers on trying to estimate the size of the Eclipse ecosystem. I'm quite confident that it's in the billion-dollar range and probably more, but we just don't have the hard numbers in terms of sizing that market. Unfortunately we haven't been able to get an analyst to actually spend the time to quantify those numbers. But what you said about the attraction to Eclipse being free, the economics of the Eclipse model is a little bit different than that, because the Eclipse community as a whole is almost uniquely focused on enabling a commercially profitable ecosystem or market around the free platform. So yes, we do provide open source tools and frameworks from Eclipse and those are provided for free. But we definitely are motivated across the Eclipse ecosystem to see people and companies make money from the Eclipse platform.

IW: What's going on with Eclipse as far as application lifecycle management? Some of that's on the agenda here, but could you maybe give a synopsis of what's going on there?

MM: Sure. There's several different projects going on at Eclipse in the area. Serena is leading a project called ALF, Application Lifecycle Framework, and Compuware is leading a project called Corona. And these are both projects that are in fairly early days, they're both in incubation. But application lifecycle management is an area where we see definite growth at Eclipse, but it's going to take some time for these projects to mature and really hit their stride.

IW: What's the difference between Corona and ALF?

MM: ALF is really focused on providing the technology for choreographing tools across multiple developers, and Corona is more focused on making it easier to integrate tools within a single workbench environment or within a single desktop environment. [There are subtle differences], but there actually are important differences for developers.