Google makes $5million code contribution to Eclipse

In August, when Google purchased Instantiations along with several of their excellent development tools, I wrote:

This may be just wishful thinking but it would be terrific if Google would donate WindowBuilder to the Eclipse project.

Today they did just that. Eric Clayberg, Software Engineering Manager for Google Developer Tools, formerly co-founder and VP of Product Development at Instantiations made this announcement in the Google Code blog:

Today we are announcing Google’s donation of the source code and IP for two of these products to the open source community through the Eclipse Foundation. This donation includes WindowBuilder, the leading Eclipse Java GUI Designer, and CodePro Profiler, which identifies Java code performance issues. Specifically, the WindowBuilder Engine and designers for SWT and Swing. All in all, this is a value of more than $5 million dollars worth of code and IP.

Eclipse is notoriously paranoid, about IP entanglements so it will take a while for the contribution to be reviewed and the projects to be officially created. Eric says we can expect to see them in the first half of 2011. He will be leading the WindowBuilder project.

Google is transitioning commercial support of these products to third parties. Genuitec intents to offer commercial support for all the WindowBuilder products, and OnPositive will offer support for the CodePro Profiler. Money from the commercial contracts will help pay the salaries for some of the committers to these projects.