Milinkovich touted Eclipse as being the industry counterpart to Microsoft. "From the tools perspective, it is very clearly evolving to two ecosystems: Microsoft and Eclipse," Milinkovich said.

Eclipse has been tightly linked to Java but the organization is more than Java, he said. "To a large degree, Eclipse is still very associated with Java, despite the fact that [we have been] very strong in C and C++ for a long time," Milinkovich said.

The PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) Web scripting language also is on Eclipse's agenda, with a PHP IDE project announced this week, led by Zend Technologies and IBM.

"I'm really excited about the PHP tools for Eclipse," Milinkovich said.

IBM for its part announced several other developments at EclipseCon on Tuesday. The company is piloting a support program for developers using Eclipse as its primary development environment. The program is for customers using both open source Eclipse and commercial Eclipse-based tools such as IBM Rational software.