If IBM is the only real contributer, obviously it is going to have an IBM slant to it. Duh.

This is exactly why Sun was smart to build an independent community of developers, and NOT corporates, around NetBeans. More innovation, more performance and at the end of the day, way more independence than Eclipse.

Plus, I find it funny to hear this. The eclipse guys always claimed that they have such a vibrant community around eclipse.

I've used both off and on over the past number of years, and until recently I'd have had a preference for Eclipse in terms of performance, flexibility etc. In version 6.0 however, Netbeans have produced a far better, more complete, IDE.

Although I can't comment over whether NetBeans is better than Eclipse or not as I haven't used NetBeans for ages, the reason I stay on Eclipse is because a lot of the plugins I use are only available on that platform. Now, if Eclipse, NetBeans, Idea et al would come together and agree to a standard for plugins so that you could build IDE independant extensions, that would be great for developers and would foster competition. One can dream...

Forget about all those GUIs whether it is NetBeans or Eclipse or IDEA or whatever !

You only have two options:

1. Emacs + OO-Browser

2. vim/gvim

Anything other then those two is just a waste of resources.