News

Eclipse board names Mike Milinkovich executive director

• By Rich Seeley
• June 4, 2004

Mike Milinkovich is the first executive director of the newly independent Eclipse Foundation. A spokesman for the Eclipse board of directors said the body selected Milinkovich, who most recently was a vice president for technical services at Oracle Corp., for his executive leadership abilities in both the technical and business fields.

Starting his new job at the beginning of June, Milinkovich's first task will be the launch of Eclipse 3.0, which is set for June 21.

"We intended to continue to make the Eclipse Java IDE one of the most productive and useful tools out there at any price, never mind free and open source the way Eclipse is," he told JDT.

Milinkovich said there is intense interest in the new release among members of the Java open-source community, who have followed its evolution, downloading it at each milestone and commenting on it and critiquing it as part of the open Eclipse process. He noted that unlike vendor product releases that are often kept under wraps with beta testers working under non-disclosure agreements, active members of the Eclipse developer community are well aware of the features of the new release. Many of them have already downloaded it in its release candidate form.

Following the Eclipse 3.0 release, Milinkovich, who said his entire career has been focused on tools, will next focus on a new open WebTools project to extend Eclipse to server-side Java.

"We're going to be supporting not only Web development in the HTML, XML variants but we're also going to be supporting application development with J2EE, and providing open-source tool support for JSP servlets and EJB construction and deployment," he told JDT.

Beyond that he plans to work to grow the Eclipse community, which will meet again in 2005, as the foundation plans to build on the success of the Eclipse Conference held in Anaheim, Calif., this past February where it declared its independence from IBM, which had initially started and managed it.

Besides his recent executive position at Oracle, Milinkovich's resume lists management positions at WebGain, and The Object People and Object Technology International Inc., which subsequently became a wholly owned subsidiary of IBM. He has a Master of Science degree in Information and Systems Sciences, and a Bachelor of Commerce degree from Carleton University in Ottawa.