The Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) was founded in 1987 by David Packard. It's located in Moss Landing, California, where its three research ships and two remotely operated vehicles are berthed, giving them immediate access to Monterey Bay. MBARI also operates several autonomous underwater vehicles and maintains moorings offshore, equipped with ocean-monitoring instruments, as well as two moorings in the equatorial Pacific that are part of the NOAA Tropical Atmosphere Ocean (TAO) array.

In my many years of programming, almost 20 years now, I have used countless integrated development environments (IDEs). I have used everything from a simple text editor all the way up to the high-end IDEs that Sybase, IBM, and Oracle use. More recently I have come to embrace the open source movement and development in Web environments. My programming language of choice for these days is PHP, so it stands to reason that I would be looking for an IDE. Like so many other developers I followed the path of looking for the pinnacle of IDEs for PHP. I started with basic text editors, moved into text editors with code colorizations, and then into project-based development environments, and finally to a fully robust IDE. The one that I've been using for a few years now is Zend's Studio Professional.

In order to describe itself as an 'open source' company, need a company merely be 'a company that will help you make the switch to open source in your company' - or does it have to be one that lets users feely download, compile, and use the software in question? Where is the dividing line? How open is 'open'? At Enterprise Open Source Magazine we contacted a range of FOSS luminaries for their take on the issue.

Programmers usually work in a so-called Integrated Development Environment (IDE). You can write, compile and run programs there. An IDE also has a Help thingy that describes all elements of the language, and makes it easier to find and fix errors in your programs. While some IDE programs are expensive, there is an excellent free IDE called Eclipse.

This year it looks certain that a new participation record will be set, more than 16,000 votes have already been recorded, as more than 20,000 SYS-CON Media readers are estimated to cast their votes in this year's Readers' Choice Awards.

The MyEclipse team has been hard a work on getting the next major upgrade to their flagship out into our hands. We recently had a chance to catch up with Maher Marsi the president of Genuitec to find our more about this latest release.

The JSR220-ORM Project proposed by Versant in March of this year - to provide a common framework for delivering productivity and consistency in the important area of object-relational mapping - has been approved by the Eclipse Foundation.

Since Eclipse's first release in 2001, it has become a popular environment for Java development. In the period between March 10 and May 11, 2005, users downloaded over 17,000 copies of one of the production SDK releases and over 3,500 copies of one of the stable (milestone) SDK builds on average every day. A vibrant eco-system of developers, plug-in providers, authors, and bloggers has grown up around it. Eclipse has also gained the backing of the key Java vendors including BEA, Borland, IBM, SAP, and Sybase. Developers like Eclipse because it provides a great platform for building Java applications, and companies like it because it unifies their software tools under one open source umbrella.

Oracle is demonstrating its commitment to the entire Java developer community by spearheading a project within the Eclipse open-source community to support the Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) 3.0 specification - one of the cornerstones of J2EE 5.0.

'Eclipse and IDEs in general have evolved from simply being a feature container into a new kind of development platform,' said Pat Kerpan, Borland's CTO, as Borland - which has been a member since the inception of Eclipse - yesterday joined the Eclipse Foundation as a Strategic Developer Member.

This year it looks certain that a new participation record will be set, as more than 4,000 votes have already been recorded in just the first seven days of voting, as more than 50,000 SYS-CON Media readers are estimated to cast their votes in this year's Readers' Choice Awards. Highlights after just one week's voting are as follows.

The Eclipse team is well on the way to the 3.1 release. The current release is M4 with M5 to follow in less than two weeks (M5 is due Feb 18th). 'I made the plunge to 3.1M4,' reports JDJ's Eclipse editor, Bill Dudney. 'I've been using it for about 4 weeks now and here are my notes on the 'new and noteworthy' stuff in the M4 release.'

eBay, The World's Online Marketplace, has more than 114 million registered users, 10,000 developers, and over 700 live, third-party applications.

SYS-CON Media, the world's leading i-technology media company, announced that its 2005 Readers' Choice Awards polls opened today, February 1, 2005, and will remain open for six months, until July 31, 2005. More than 50,000 readers are expected to cast their votes to select the best software products and services of the year for Java, Linux, Web Services, XML, Microsoft .NET, ColdFusion and Macromedia MX.

SYS-CON Media (www.sys-con.com), the world's leading i-technology media company, announced today that SYS-CON.TV (www.sys-con.tv), the first streaming live i-technology television is scheduled to debut on February 15, 2005 to coincide with the first day of the upcoming Web Services Edge 2005 East - International Web Services Conference Expo.

A $170 million system commissioned by the FBI to securely distribute information among agents, is worthless, the agency said, and will not be used.

Distancing itself ever further from arch-rival Microsoft, whose CEO Bill Gates tried during his keynote at CES 2005 to liken open source software development to a kind of modern-day communism, IBM will today be giving away rights - so it is announcing - to 500 of its software patents.

Four Moscow-based security experts with Kaspersky Labs have reported that the number of new entries to its malware database jumped by more than 30 in 2004 - with the two record holders for damage caused being Mydoom.a (February) and Sasser.a (May).

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation - whose watchword is 'We believe that the world's toughest problems can be solved - if we work together' - is giving $3M to help those struck by the natural disaster that's wreaked such havoc in South Asia. Amazon.com has helped channel even more, $3.5M - as the wider Internet community joins the fund-raising effort.

CA has joined the Eclipse Foundation and will contribute code to the Eclipse Test and Performance Tools Platform (TPTP) Top-Level Project. 'Joining the Eclipse Foundation underscores CA's commitment to embrace the open source paradigm,' said Yogesh Gupta, senior vice president and chief technology officer at CA.

SYS-CON Media today announced further details of the upcoming cross-platform technology event, Web Services Edge 2005 East - International Web Services Conference & Expo (www.sys-con.com/edge), to be held in Boston at the Hynes Convention Center, February 15-17, 2005. More than 3,000 i-technology professionals are expected to participate this year including the show expo floor, making it the largest Web Services event of the year. The following is the official announcement of the keynotes, sponsors, conference tracks and sessions, tutorials, and the Web Services case studies to be presented during this year's three-day event.

In an all-cash deal worth approximately $10.3 billion, Oracle is going to acquire 100% of PeopleSoft's shares, at a newly increased price of $26.50, a $2.50 increase on its 'best and final' offer which expired in November. PeopleSoft's board has approved the deal. 'We believe this revised offer provides good value for PeopleSoft stockholders and represents a substantial increase in value from October,' says the chairman of PeopleSoft's transaction committee, George 'Skip' Battle. Says Oracle's Ellison: 'Today we announced both a great quarter and the agreement to acquire PeopleSoft. This merger gives Oracle even more scale and momentum.'

IBM announced the creation of a new consortium designed to advance Power-based processors. The organization is to be modeled around the structure IBM created for Eclipse.org.

IBM released a new plug-in for Eclipse that makes developers' jobs easier, by providing visualizations of Web services transactions.

Telelogic has released an enhanced version of its leading change management tool, SYNERGY/CM for Eclipse 3.0. This is expected to add to the functionality of open source projects, and provide a usable change management (CM) tool for large enterprises.

Basel, Switzerland-based Canoo has released a new plug-in for Eclipse 3.0 that simplifies Rich Internet Application (RIA) development with the UltraLightClient (ULC) Java library. The new plug-in, says Canoo, provides a tight ULC integration into the Eclipse IDE, enabling developers to deliver pure Java-based RIAs with unprecedented efficiency.

Since its original launch in February, multiple companies have used IBM's 'Autonomic Computing Toolkit' to implement autonomic functions into their applications and services, with some currently already on the market. A new version of that toolkit launched today will feature expanded Eclipse tooling and additional platform support.

'There are those that persist in trying to draw the industry as filled with binary extremes,' writes Jonathan Schwartz, currently the industry's highest-profile blogger. But it isn't an either/or choice these days, Schwartz argues, in his latest effusion. It isn't open-source or proprietary. It all depends 'upon the constituency you're serving,' Schwartz says.

In July IBM announced that the Rational tool set would be fully integrated within the Eclipse tool set and would provide an integrated set of tools to support the full life cycle of software development. Recently I was able to interview Lee Nackman, the CTO of the Rational division of IBM.

The Eclipse Foundation announced very strong gains within the organization. Growth occurred across all sectors, with increases in new Eclipse members, the number of companies using the Eclipse platform, and the number of new projects being developed.

If Sun were ever acquired, what would become of Java? As the 16-month Oracle-PeopleSoft takeover saga comes to an apparent climax, and with the echoes of the Kodak vs Sun patent infringement decision still ringing in everyone's ears, that perennial vexed question has naturally bubbled up again.

With the release of Sun's latest version of J2SE not yet a week old, Sun has already outlined elements of Java's next revision, code-named 'Mustang.' Company officials offered some very early schematics, pegging spring 2006 as a potential release date. Sun reaffirmed its belief in fostering compatibility between platforms, as opposed to total transparency of source code, noting that the complete J2SE code would not be making it to the open source community.

Brazil's largest Java community is supporting the country's government in its efforts to adopt nationally and abroad an open source version of Java. Brazil says the move is needed to prevent vendor lock-in. Sun meanwhile stands committed to ensuring compatibility of products running on Java.

A 'mystery candidate,' Maureen O'Gara reports, described so far only as a 'senior executive at a high-technology company,' has emerged in the hunt for a permanent CEO of beleaguered Computer Associates. Seems the CA board is setting it up to push interim CEO Kenneth Cron, who'd like to continue, out. O'Gara offers her own stab at who the new favorite might be.

CA is going to fire about 5% of its 15,000 employees in the next month, affecting 800 employees worldwide. 70% of the terminations are to be in North America, with 200 people dropped at the company's Islandia, Long Island headquarters.

In the first of a new series of sneak peeks into upcoming Eclipse plugins, Mike Henderson bravely shares with the wider developer community his first cut at a plugin, a Tapestry Palette to browse the components available in a project. 'It's very beta right now,' he says. 'There is only minimal error checking,' Henderson points out. He's hoping for some great feedback right here, so he can then work on the various improvements to the plugin that are posted.

JBoss is joining the Eclipse Foundation as a member, and will help with code development for the J2EE Standard Tools Project. JBoss uses the Eclipse platform as a development environment in products such as JBoss-IDE, a J2EE development tool.

Software Configuration Management (SCM) solutions provider MKS is providing expanded integration for Eclipse and IBM WebSphere development environments, by adding MKS Integrity Manager onto developers' desktops. This is the first time Change Management functionality will be offered in such an environment.

Tomcat 5.5, released by The Apache Software Foundation, has some major improvements over its predecessor. One of the most significant changes in the latest release includes the use of an Eclipse JDT to compile Java. However, both developers and Tomcat community members have said the release is unstable.

The question 'How will Sun ever make money off giving so much source-code to open source' - as it did in 2000 with OpenOffice.org, has most recently with Project Looking Glass and is about to again with Solaris - is the wrong one, argues Sun's Simon Phipps. 'It's a good question,' he says, but at its heart - he argues - 'lies a misunderstanding about the nature of open source software, and once that's cleared up everything falls into place much more easily.'