David Johnson, director of software engineering at E! Entertainment Television Inc. in Los Angeles, said that most developers at his firm choose to use the Eclipse IDE. "Eclipse early on integrated well with our source management system, where other tools were lagging behind in support," he said.

Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Ottawa-based Eclipse Foundation, said in a typical month that the foundation -- which became independent of its founder IBM in 2004 -- has 500,000 download requests for the production version of its software development kit.