On the eve of Eclipse becoming it’s own legal entity and IBM becoming less involved with the development of the tool platform, Sun published a letter to Eclipse on their website offering help and guidance.
The letter reads like a plea to become involved (now that IBM will not be so dominant within the group), but I guess Sun are genuinely concerned that the Eclipse group could splinter the Java platform, escpecially with concepts such as the SWT (Standard Widget Toolkit) – a replacement for Swing and AWT components that is deliberately platform dependent (for performance and platform UI reasons) – something that Sun is also deliberately trying to avoid (to keep true the ‘write once run anywhere’ philosophy).