Eclipse Gets $20,000 from Google to Fix Its Performance Problems

Open source is at the core of many of the biggest or the best known companies of the moment. Many of those companies are far from what you'd call open, even Google or Twitter, but that's another discussion.

Google, Facebook, Twitter and even the old guard, regularly contribute code to open source projects, release projects of their own, or donate to these projects.

This is about the latter, Google has pledged $20,000, €15,655 to the Eclipse Foundation, the organization behind the popular open source IDE, to be used for testing hardware.

The recent Eclipse 4.2 release has been criticized on its performance and the lack of hardware needed for tests and optimization is at least partially to blame.

"Given the recently raised news concerning 4.2's performance, and the loss of testing hardware previously provided by some member companies, Google's Open Source Programs Office is sending the Eclipse Foundation a donation of $20,000 to purchase hardware and begin building a common testing lab," Google's Shawn Pearce wrote in an Eclipse email thread.

"Some of this donation may also be used to support the common build infrastructure, subject to Denis Roy's and Mike Milinkovich's discretion," he added.

Eclipse is used for Java especially, it is written in Java itself, and is a core tool in the Android developer toolset. As such, you can imagine it's quite important to Google and its performance directly affects the Android ecosystem.

The plan now is to start optimizing future releases of Eclipse 4.2 and focus on performance in particular. Eclipse 4.2 is a major update over the previous version and comes with a lot of new code, accounting for the performance regression.

Mike Milinkovich, the executive director of the Eclipse Foundation wrote a more detailed post on the performance issues, future plans and Google's donation.

"However, there are thousands of companies and millions of developers that make use of Eclipse every day. We need more of these companies to come forward to start participating in the core Eclipse platform. Google’s contribution is a perfect example," he said.