An Eclipse Runtime?

Looks like Eclipse wants to take the jump from being a IDE to being a full runtime platform.

At EclipseCon 2008 in Santa Clara, Calif on Monday, the project leaders announced the Eclipse Runtime project (Eclipse RT) an initiative to build an open source run-time technology based on its own Equinox, a lightweight OSGi compliant run-time. Equinox, the core run-time platform for Eclipse, is not new. The run-time is used by Actuate, BEA, Code 9, Iona, IBM and Oracle and is reportedly deployed on millions of developers’ desktops

Will this be a competitor for Java or .NET. I am sure a lot of people hope so. My take, it is going to be very difficult due to the large following these runtimes currently have and the amount of corporate muscle (MS or Sun is not going to let someone else take over that easily) that are behind these platforms. It is going to be a long shot, but sometime long shots do turn out sucessful..

Eclipse launches super run-time project as alternative to Java and .NET