"I love Eclipse, I use it everyday. I think it's a fantastic tool for development," said William Blinn, software engineer at Tamale, which builds an organizational and collaboration system for financial professionals. Eclipse, Blinn said, "makes everything so easy."

However, the Eclipse platform still could use improvement in terms of memory consumption, according to Blinn. "It's kind of heavy in terms of memory," Blinn said. "If you load up the IDE and put a couple of big projects in it, it kind of loads your system up."

Eclipse has been successful and now must face the challenge of continuing on this success, said Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

"I suppose the larger question is whether the success Eclipse has had so far is going to be continuing and repeatable," Gardner said. For companies with an established business model, an open source model could be a challenge to adapt to, he said. Startups, however, do not face this obstacle, said Gardner, citing Genuitec, which has built a business selling its MyEclipse IDE.

Milinkovich briefly joked about conspiracy theories surrounding Eclipse, citing one in which participants are battling "Samurai Burger," which is a code name for Sun. Although Sun invented the Java programming language that has formed a technology basis for Eclipse, Sun has not participated in Eclipse. Sun rival IBM founded Eclipse.