As a strategic member of Eclipse, Compuware would have to pay as much as $250,000 annually, lead an Eclipse project and commit a minimum of eight developers.

Should Compuware become a strategic member, among the possible projects the company might participate in are the Test and Performance Tools Project, the Application Lifecycle Framework (ALF), and the Open Modeling Environment with Links for Extensions and Transformations (OMELET).

Moreover, the Eclipse Foundation's Milinkovich is slated to deliver a keynote at the Compuware OJ.X developer conference in Detroit next month.

Meanwhile, Iona has been aligning more and more closely with the open-source community, having announced Celtix, its open-source enterprise service bus initiative, and also adopting Eclipse.

New strategic members would join BEA Systems Inc., Borland Software Corp. and Sybase Inc. among the companies that joined the Eclipse organization this year.

Just which company did Eclipse want to eclipse? Click here to read more.

At the EclipseWorld conference, Borland's chief technology officer, Patrick Kerpan, said, "Eclipse is the end of retooling core development capabilities for each evolutionary step of software engineering."

He said the opportunity to not have to take that step with each "epoch" is why Borland decided to join Eclipse.

Raj Nathan, senior vice president of the Information Technology and Solutions Group at Sybase Inc., also at EclipseWorld said Sybase adopted the Eclipse platform for much the same reason.

"We wanted a uniform platform from which we could innovate," Nathan said. "We did not want to have to continue to reinvent the wheel."

This article was originally published on eWEEK.com.