Only silly companies compete with free. The smart ones partner with it. Consider the Eclipse example: Eclipse and the surrounding set of tools for debugging,

Only silly companies compete with free. The smart ones partner with it. Consider the Eclipse example: Eclipse and the surrounding set of tools for debugging, testing and profiling Java code are not great. But they are good enough because they are free. Companies could no longer justify paying for products from, for example, Borland and as a result, IBM's strategy worked beautifully I guess he doesn't know about Builder 2007: http://www.codegear.com/products/jbuilder http://www.codegear.com/products/jbuilder Builder 2007 is an IDE built on the open source Eclipse framework, which makes development ... So here you have IBM and Borland both leveraging the same open source framework.