The SD Times has published its annual “SD Times 100,” honoring companies and organizations influencing the future of software development. Top honorees include the Eclipse Foundation and Wind River, with a number of other Linux- and embedded-oriented companies — and enemies — also rating inclusion.

The Eclipse Foundation took top honors in the “Tools & Environments” category, where, the SD Times notes, “The second release of the Eclipse IDE [click here for more], and robust support from a wide range of industry contributors [story] continued catapulting the framework higher — and deeper — into the Java and Linux universes.”

SlickEdit, which makes IDEs used by hardware-assisted tools vendor American Arium, real-time embedded Linux distributor FSMLabs, and visual GNU-tools vendor Microcross are also listed in this category.

Wind River took top honors in the all-important “Embedded & Mobile” category. According to the SD Times, “When the top real-time embedded operating system vendor embraces a Linux strategy [story], everyone takes notice. Wind River's courage, vision and humility might spell the end for proprietary RTOSes.”

Also noted in the category are ARM Ltd., whose ARM architecture has become the top choice among embedded Linux developers, according to a LinuxDevices.com survey; and Metrowerks, which sells its CodeWarrior IDE for nearly every embedded OS and platform, including embedded Linux. Linux detractor Green Hills Software also made the list.

Another Linux detractor, SCO, took the top spot in the “Influencers” category. Says the SD Times: “The company's legal assaults on IBM and Linux users [Story] dominated 2003's tech headlines and shook up the open-source community. No other IT topic inspires such fervent debate, fear, uncertainty and doubt.” The Open Source Development Labs, Linux promoter and backer of standardization efforts such as the Carrier Grade Linux initiative, was also mentioned.

Trolltech made mention in the “Components & Libraries” category. Trolltech's embedded Linux-oriented products include Qt/Embedded, which Motorola chose for its Linux-based smartphones; Qtopia, an application stack for PDAs popularized by Sharp's Linux-based Zaurus and other Linux-based PDAs; and Qtopia Phone Edition.

Top honors in the database category were taken by well-known Linux commercial success MySQL AB. SleepyCat Software, whose Berkeley DB is widely used in embedded Linux systems and recently gained support for Carrier Grade Linux, was also mentioned, as was iAnywhere, which has partnered with Sharp on Zaurus development tools, and Pervasive Software, which sells databases supporting connections from remote embedded Linux devices such as point-of-sales terminals.

In the “Collaboration” category, Linux- and Open Source-oriented CollabNet and VA Software are mentioned.

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