Big corp open sourcing great opportunity for small companies...

Today I read a blog entry discussing why they thought big company open sourcing policies would be bad for small companies in the open source community...

I'd like to comment on the open sourcing of an IDE (like Eclipse)... And how the open-sourcing of Eclipse is great for small companies... 2 examples:

• A small company building a tool for developers that wanted to provide an IDE had to build it from scratch, which would be multi-man-year task to produce a proprietary IDE that would probably not be very useful beyond whatever task they had in mind... Now they can leverage all of the effort that went into Eclipse and just build a plug-in...
  
• There is still a huge opportunity in developing plug-ins, etc for Eclipse... Some small companies will choose to open source their plugin such as the tremendously great Spindle plugin for Tapestry, developed by Geoff... Others choose to sell their plugins - and all see opportunities here, without having to build an IDE from scratch...
  

Going back to a world without Eclipse is like going back to a world without standard windowing environments where everyone was building their own windowing/gui interfaces...