On Developing Open Source MDE Tools: Our Eclipse Stories and Lessons Learned

Tool development has always been a fundamental activity of Software Engineering. Nowadays, open source is changing the way this is done in many organizations. Traditional ways of doing things are progressively enhanced or even sometimes replaced by new organizational schemes, benefiting as much as possible from the properties of open source (OS). This is especially true in innovative areas such as Model Driven Engineering (MDE) in which new tools are constantly created, developed and disseminated, many of them coming from research teams. This poses some hard questions: What is the actual impact of OS in terms of tool development? How to best take advantage of OS communities? And what are the opportunities for research teams in this context? Capitalizing on experiences in developing MDE OS tools on top of the Eclipse platform and its license model, we try to give some insights on these questions in this paper.

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