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Oracle exec takes the reins at Eclipse

Martin LaMonica CNET News

Published: 28 May 2004 17:10 BST

The Eclipse open-source group has named an Oracle executive as its first executive director since it gained independence from IBM.

Mike Milinkovich, who previously was vice president of Oracle's application server technical services, is slated to become executive director of Eclipse on Tuesday. The appointment follows the creation in February of a not-for-profit in place of the consortium that IBM founded in 2001 under the same name. Until January, IBM executive Skip McGaughey had been the chairman.

Eclipse software provides a system for letting different tools plug into a single programming application. Use of Eclipse software among developers has shot up in the past year, and the group now has more than 50 members, including tools and application providers.

Milinkovich said in a statement that his top priorities as executive director include shipping the Eclipse 3.0 software in the early summer and the launch of a WebTools project for improving Web development tools. He also said he intends to form a management organisation to supervise planning of Eclipse projects.

Milinkovich, who has experience with object-oriented programming, also worked at ObjectPeople, which was acquired by Oracle in 2002. ObjectPeople made a product called TopLink, a tool for getting data out of relational databases with object-oriented programming