Comment by edg5000 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by edg5000 | Hacker News Reader

Although Eclipse was once an IBM project, nowadays it is the Eclipse Foundation that is behind it. The Eclipse foundation is funded, it seems, by IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Red Hat, Huawei and many others.

Is this essentially a VS Code fork? Are they not happy with VS Code? After using Eclipse for everything for ages, I moved completely to VS Code. Like Eclipse, it is really well put together, as many would agree with me.

I'm not sure why the project exists. I assume they want to take the development into a direction that would not be possible with the MS-led VS Code?

Edit: Found the answer: "Eclipse Theia is an open and vendor-neutral project with a diverse community of contributors from large corporations down to small companies and even individual developers. This diverse and steadily growing community is a stable base for the ongoing development of additional features and maintenance of existing functionality based on a broad and balanced view of the requirements put forward by the Theia adopters. The commercial-friendly licensing and the rigorous underlying IP management ensures that adopters can safely build commercial and internal products based on Theia." [https://theia-ide.org/docs/project_goals/]

No, it's not a fork.

Theia reuses some components (like the Monaco code editor), but the reason it looks and feels a lot like VSCode is mostly that they decided to copy it.

They explain the reasons for creating a VSCode clone here [1]. In short, they don't consider VSCode to be fully open source, and Theia wants the code to be both free and unencumbered by Microsoft's licensing and proprietary code, and also available to commercial vendors to use as the foundation for commercial products. That includes an open extension system that isn't owned by anyone, unlike Microsoft's marketplace.

Secondly, Theia is two things. One is an IDE positioned to compete with VSCode and every other IDE out there. The other is as an extensible platform to build IDEs, either open source or proprietary. This is exactly the same strategy as the Eclipse platform, except built in web tech.

This earlier HN discussion has a lot more discussion [2].

I think the Eclipse people could have communicated all of this a lot better. When you put a VSCode clone in front of developers, your first task needs to be to explain how it's not a fork, and why it exists. The Theia site's front page [3] doesn't even mention VSCode by name.

[1] https://blogs.eclipse.org/post/mike-milinkovich/eclipse-thei...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22738607

[3] https://theia-ide.org/

Fascinating, thanks for clarifying.

Note that Java support on VSCode, is provided by Red-Hat and Microsoft, and is basically Eclipse running headless.

With Oracle plugins for VSCode being Netbeans running headless.

Which ironically means having Electron on top of their existing resource usage.

So anyone saying that they prefer VSCode to pure Eclipse for Java coding, better look out their CPU monitoring tools.

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