Everyone,
It is really great that Eric sent this out to us. I was telling my wife last night that I would jump on it if I had a small business. (National Labs are ineligible.)
I am available - and Eric might be as well - to answer questions, to the best of my ability, about this funding opportunity if anyone is interested. I will also write letters of support for good proposals. I encourage you to focus on the extremely positive side of this: the US government is requesting proposals for doing Eclipse development! All of the other things - Java versions, eligibility, etc. are just details that can be worked around.
For example, if I was writing a proposal for this, I would propose to use e(fx)clipse to "update" most of CSS' UI and to integrate Diirt via the viz service infrastructure in ICE, (and soon EAVP), which was made precisely to integrate third party visualization tools. I would also propose to use JavaFX's native plotting and 3D visualization capabilities where possible. That might win and it might not, but it definitely sounds like a cool project to me!
Please note that the maximum size of the award for this proposal is $150,000 for phase I and $1,000,000 for phase II. The exact details are in the call.