I just noticed that Tim Boudreau at Sun has taken down his recent blog that was very negative about Eclipse. Seems like he was having a bad day. As someone who on occassion has sent a couple of late night e-mails that I later regret, I can certainly relate. I applaud Tim for taking the high road. Wouldn’t it be nice if the other Sun employee, Charles Ditzel would just show the same amount of integrity.
Maybe there is hope?
Ian Skerrett 
I like that he’s retracted the idea of the post but “unpublishing” it isn’t the best way to go about doing it in the blogging medium.
A general “rule” amongst bloggers is that once a post is published it should stay published because people will link to it and talk about it. If you remove the post all of those linked posts lose their original context (and credibility).
Alternatively he could have linked to a retraction post or statement instead of replacing it. This has happened in the blogging community many times in the past but there are always new people that don’t know the “unwritten rules”. No worries, we all learned as we went along.
It’s amazing that people don’t realise they are quite literally talking to The Entire World when they blog. People are getting fired over blogging for that very reason. It’s sad, yet fascinating from a social aspect.
Ditzel is a paid Sun watchdog. His job is to take the low road.
I will continue to blog about NetBeans. Sorry if it offends you – feel free to visit my blog. If you are offended by the comments made by Eclipse developers that have looked at both IDEs and have switched (or not) then maybe you shouldn’t visit it. I can understand that you may not enjoy watching that or seeing it as a topic of conversation.
I find it funny that people throw ad hominem comments (low-road, paid watchdog – some as anonymous) – but fail to discuss my blog entries – for example : (1) SWT-AWT is badly broken on MacOS X – some key Eclipse plugins don’t work at all not to mention other software, (2) Some Eclipse developers are switching to NetBeans and (3) Eclipse performance on Linux being slow according to Eclipse developers.
NetBeans 4.1 has some fabulous features that I will continue to talk about (such as GUI Building,a great profiler, full J2EE, full J2SE 5.0, a mobile pack, Ant Project support, award-winning debugger, etc).
Cheers.
Charles
Charles,
I certainly hope you continue to blog about Netbeans. Competition is healthy and will keep us all honest. However, I believe your tactics have turned off a lot of people. Things like:
1) Posting on Javalobby put not clearly identifing yourself as a Sun employee.
2) Your blog does not make it clear that you are a Sun employee. People have to notice that one of your e-mail address is sun.com. You also don’t allow for comments on your blog, so no one can dispute any of your claims.
3) Statements like ‘SWT-AWT is badly broken on MacOS X’ and ‘Eclipse performance on Linux being slow according to Eclipse developers’ are subjective and negative. Lots of people use Eclispe on Mac with no problems. Lots of Linux developers use Eclipse and have no performance problems. I am not saying we can’t be better but I know Netbeans has its problems too.
I think it is great if you stick to talking about the great things NetBeans has to offer. That is positive marketing and that is how we drive forward the Java community.
First, I disagree with you. I have pointed out some basic differences that Eclipse developers themselves are stating upfront. Second, yes – Eclipse developers recently have started to switch (1 2 3) to NetBeans. I simply provided the reasons why many of them are switching. Is that disingenuine or false ? No. I even carefully point to the developers’ own words in their blogs and forums.
I have identified myself clearly often enough to the JavaLobby community through numerous posts and through many attempts to remedy issues – since you haven’t been involved in the JavaLobby forums I can understand the confusion you may have. I also put my email address at the upper left hand corner of my blog. It’s hard to miss. Developers often use the address from my blog to contact me on issues concerning Java and Sun.
However – this is all a bit of a diversion on your part, addressing Eclipse developers complaints or even acknowledging them would be more appropriate.
By the way – would you say (for example) that :
SWT-AWT not working on MacOS X is a serious flaw with Eclipse on MacOS – wouldn’t you say when plugin vendors and Swing developers can’t use basic standard Java APIs there is a big problem ? It is neither subjective nor negative – it is simply the true state of affairs on MacOS X and Eclipse.
Or the GUI Builder evaluation by an Eclipse developer that finds Eclipse Visual Editor not ready for primetime and describes NetBeans has having the best integrated open source GUI builder ? Wouldn’t you say that this is of interest to developers ? This is the good work of a developer – you may not agree with it – but it is the state of where things stand.
I could go on. The point is that you have never bothered to address the actual content – just to do ad hominem distractions. You carefully avoid challenging the content of my blogs primarily because you know that the voices in those blogs are correct and those voices are members or were members of the Eclipse community.
In any case if I see you at JavaONE 2005 I will buy you a beer 🙂
Cheers
Charles
http://cld.blog-city.com
Charles,
Sorry but you just don’t get it. I have no interest in using my blog to debate with you the relative merits of your posts.
Why don’t you allow for comments on your blog and I am sure you will get lots of feedback. btw, since you don’t allow for comments on your blog I will be deleting any future posts you make here.
Ian