Who's Using Linux?
Application developers, system administrators, network providers, kernel hackers, students, and multimedia authors are just a few of the categories of people who find that Linux has a particular charm.
Programmers are increasingly using Linux because of its extensibility and low cost—they can pick up a complete programming environment for free and run it on inexpensive PC hardware—and because Linux offers a great development platform for portable programs. In addition to the original FSF tools, Linux can utilize a number of development environments that have surfaced over the last three years, such as Eclipse (http://eclipse.org). Eclipse is quite a phenomenon: a tribute to both the creativity of the open source community and the fertility of a collaboration between an open source community and a major vendor (Eclipse was originally developed and released by IBM). It is an open source community focused on providing an extensible development platform and application frameworks for building software.
Eclipse's tools and frameworks span the software development life cycle, including support for modeling; language development environments for Java?, C/C++, and other languages; testing and performance; business intelligence; rich client applications; and embedded development. A large, vibrant ecosystem of major technology vendors, innovative startups, universities, and research institutions and individuals extend, complement, and support the Eclipse platform.
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