"We're talking about over 6 million lines of code that's going into this Callisto release," Milinkovich said.

Eclipse participants agreed with the organization's strategy.

"We think it's a great idea. It's I think the first [example] of a really coordinated open source project delivering some solid value to the community," Bill Roth, vice president of the Workshop business unit at BEA Systems, said.

Coordinating Eclipse projects into a single release benefits vendors who build commercial products that leverage Eclipse, according to Roth. "It makes my ability to schedule project releases a lot easier," he said.

"[The unified release] basically saves us a lot of time and energy," said Tim Land, vice president of developer marketing at Business Objects.