Life at Eclipse

As mentioned by Ted Leung, this weekend the OSCON folks have organized the Free/Libre Open Source Software Project Summit. A big “thank you” goes to Allison Randal for all of the work to set this up.

The first day was focused on intros, overviews of organization, governance and funding. It was very interesting to see how many different ways the problems of creating a community and a foundation have been dealt with. Every single foundation is subtly different, and every single one is marked by the history and distinct personality of its community. Perhaps not surprising, but quite striking when you see it all in the same room at the same time.

One of the projects I found particularly interesting was the work done the OSL/OSU and the general buzz around open source in the Portland area. There is a lot of focus from industry, academia and local government to create open source companies and projects in the Portland area. I am going to see what I can do to help create some similar efforts in the Ottawa area when I am not traveling 🙂

I just read a hilarious presentation from ApacheCon Europe entitled Why I Hate the Apache Web Server.

I think that any successful project with some history will have some warts and inconsistencies. I’m sure we have our share.

Anyone out there interested in creating a similar presentation for EclipseCon 2006? If you are, check out the call for particiption. Of course, it will have to be lighthearted, but anyone who can find something as darn funny as using =! rather than != will get a free beer from me 😉

This is sort of “better late than never”, but between traveling to JavaOne and our Foundation staff member meeting last week, I missed Kirill Grouchnikov’s blog posting on who fixed what bugs in Eclipse 3.1.

With regard to the Eclipse projects, IBM still has over half of the committers working on them. (I’ve covered this before here.) So it is neither a secret nor a surprise that they are still carrying the load on many of the projects that were started before the creation of the Foundation. But the interesting data is the trend line on new projects such as BIRT or ECF, where 0% of the committers work for IBM. Kirill’s list of projects was more than a little self serving. It reminds me of the old line about “lies, damn lies and statistics”. For every project within Eclipse that someone can point to which has a lot of IBMers on it, I can point to another which has few or none. What does this prove?

What I don’t understand is why anyone thinks it matters. Eclipse started its life as an IBM project and is evolving into an independent open source community with a diverse group of committers. These are non-controversial facts as far as I’m concerned.

When I talk about Eclipse independence, I am usually thinking of the governance model, where IBM truly set Eclipse free to evolve in the future as an independent entity. The fact that fierce IBM competitors such as BEA, Borland and Computer Associates feel comfortable with the Eclipse governance model to join the board speaks for itself IMO.

Yes, it will take time to evolve the older projects to have more diverse committer populations. But there is no way the Eclipse community wants IBM to slow down its investment in Eclipse. The more the merrier, we say. The goal is to grow the committer community and over time lower IBM’s percentage of a much bigger pie. And new projects like GMF (led by Borland), DSDP (led by Wind River) and DTP (led by Sybase) are moving us quickly in that direction.