Hah yeah, I remember Bongo and IFC and did some work on one of their competitors. In retrospect, yes, it's not an approach that really had much of a chance in the long term because at the end of the day, it's building dynamic dispatch/message passing and all sorts of other scaffolding out of more-or-less strings on top of a language/runtime that's supposed to provide these.
IBM named it Eclipse just to poke Sun in the eye. And it worked, it totally tweaked them! A friend of mine working at Sun at the time once lamented to me that "The name 'Eclipse' is so unfortunate. And why won't anybody use NetBeans?" ;)
Eclipse is a big bold name with an obvious meaning related to Sun, that expressed IBM's goal in one word: they intended to eclipse Sun in the Java world.
Their plausibly deniable cover story was that they meant to be competitive with Visual Studio on Windows (which was a passive-aggressive dig at Sun, because Sun had nothing to compare with Visual Studio, which was more ambitious than NetBeans to eclipse).
>Back in 2003, when Sun Microsystems Inc. was considering whether it might join the then soon-to-be-independent Eclipse Foundation, one of the key concerns, aside from technical issues, was the name Eclipse.
>Sun said it would not join an organization named Eclipse, and the foundation agreed to change the name. The Santa Clara, Calif., company didn't want to join an organization whose name was perceived as encouraging the demise of Sun, company executives said at the time. [...]
>"We decided to do what it would take to be competitive with Visual Studio on Windows," he [IBM's Nackman] said.
>So the target then was and now is Microsoft, not Sun, he said.
>But the name seems so perfect a knock against Sun. How could it not be? Well, according to a source, some of the early Eclipse originators had a retreat where one of the themes was the universe and many code names emerged involving celestial themes. Eclipse stuck. And while Sun was not necessarily the primary target, "these were really smart people, and I don't think the visualization and competitive implication was lost," a source said. [...]
>The Eclipse open-source development platform is outshining Sun's NetBeans in terms of developer and vendor support, but Sun vows to continue to innovate around NetBeans.
>Does Sun have lunar envy? [...]
>And of the tools landscape, a Microsoft source said: "The game is not over, but when we think of developer ecosystems other than Visual Studio we think Eclipse. We don't think NetBeans."
