Today, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) announced it has awarded the ACM Software System Award for 2011 to the IBM technical leaders responsible for Eclipse: John Wiegand, Dave Thomson, Greg Adams, Philippe Mulet, Julian Jones, John Duimovich, Kevin Haaland, Erich Gamma (now with Microsoft) and Steve Northover (now with Oracle).  JohnW, Dave, Philippe, Julian, Kevin, and Erich were also founders of the Jazz project – way to go guys!

Eclipse was focused on the idea of a universal IDE – integrating tools together on the desktop to improve the productivity of individual programmers. The Jazz platform is built on Eclipse technology and focused on integrating tasks across the software lifecycle to improve the productivity of an entire team.  Our Eclipse open source heritage shows through in the transparent style of development at jazz.net and with Eclipse Lyo and OSLC, a cross-industry collaboration on open specifications for lifecycle integration.

As Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation, said in his blog today, when Eclipse was built and released the notion that you could build a general-purpose tooling platform that was uniformly modular throughout its entire architecture was revolutionary.  We are really proud of these guys, what they were able to start, and what the Eclipse community has been able to accomplish since.

John Kellerman
Program Director IBM Rational Open Development
Member, Eclipse Foundation Board of Directors