Inteview with Tim Boudreau of Sun’s NetBeans

From oLinux.br: “Originally, the NetBeans IDE began as a
student project – a few students who were Borland Delphi fans
wanted to see if they could write something like Delphi in Java,
for Java. In fact, the first version was called Xelfi.

This attracted some interest, and eventually a company was
created, and the name was changed to NetBeans. Open source
was always a consideration – the simple rationale was this: No
one vendor will either have the resources or find it strategic to
build all of the functionality users want. So without some
openness, developers would never have a tool that is truly what
they want.”